A Practice of Anthropology: The Thought and Influence of Marshall Sahlins [20160501 ed.] 9780773598621

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a p r ac t ic e o f an th ropology

Marshall Sahlins at Manny’s Cafeteria and Delicatessen, Chicago, 2007. Photograph by Alan Thomas.

A Practice Of Anthropology The Thought and Influence of Marshall Sahlins

E d it ed By

Al e x Gol ub Dani e l Rosenblatt John D. Kelly

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2016 isbn isbn isbn isbn

978-0-7735-4688-2 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4689-9 (paper) 978-0-7735-9862-1 (ePDF) 978-0-7735-9863-8 (ePUB)

Legal deposit second quarter 2016 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication   A practice of anthropology : the thought and influence of Marshall Sahlins / edited by Alex Golub, Daniel Rosenblatt, John D. Kelly. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4688-2 (cloth). -- ISBN 978-0-7735-4689-9 (paperback).-ISBN 978-0-7735-9862-1 (ePDF). -- ISBN 978-0-7735-9863-8 (ePUB)   1. Sahlins, Marshall, 1930–. 2. Ethnology. 3. Social change. I. Rosenblatt, Daniel, editor II. Kelly, John D., editor III. Golub, Alex, editor IV. Sahlins, Marshall, 1930–, honouree GN320.P73 2016  306  C2016-900711-1 C2016-900712-X Typeset by New Leaf Publication Design in 10.5/13 Baskerville

Contents

Table and Figures  vii Preface Claude Lévi-Strauss ix Introduction: A Practice of Anthropology – The Work of Marshall Sahlins, So Far Alex Golub, Daniel Rosenblatt, and John D. Kelly  3 1 How Long Is a Longue Durée? Structure, Duration, and the Cultural Analysis of Cultural Change Joel Robbins 40 2 Monarchical Visions: Constructions of “Kingship” in Colonial Samoa Jocelyn Linnekin 63 3 Slow Time: Culture, Materiality, and the Knowability of the Neolithic Webb Keane 91 4 From Jew to Roman: Mr Joske, Mr Brewster, The Hill Tribes of Fiji, and the Hill Tribes of Fiji Martha Kaplan  113 5 Supplement to Marshall Sahlins’s Voyage Around the Islands of History (Tahiti 1768, Samoa 1787) Serge Tcherkézoff 133

vi Contents

6 Chassé-croisé: Or How Christianity Appropriated Indigenous Appropriation of Christianity on the Rio Negro Manuela Carneiro da Cunha  152 7 The Past Is Old, the Future Is Traditional: Ircenrraat, the DOT , and the Inventiveness of Tradition Ann Fienup-Riordan 182 8 The Kafka Connection: Structure, Lifeworld, and the Cunning of History Jonathan Friedman 203 9 Way-Finding: Respectfulness as a Performance Art Greg Dening 237 Bibliography  263 Contributors  291 Index 293

Tables and Figures

Tables

8.1 The shifting content of progressive ideology  217

Figures



2.1 Laupepa’s letter to Queen Victoria  64 2.2 Mata‘ata Iosefo  78 6.1 The Upper and Middle Rio Negro basin. Source : Instituto Socioambiental, 2008  154 7.1 Nelson Island place names. Drawn by Michael Knapp 183 7.2 Qasginguaq, June 2009. Photo by Ann Fienup-Riordan 184 8.1 External meets internal occidentalism  218 8.2 Components of the concentric shift in political culture 230 8.3 Diametric to concentric dualism  230 9.1a Tupaia’s chart. Drawn by Emily Brissenden, after 1.133, p. 130, in The Charts and Coastal Views of Captain Cook’s Voyages, vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768– 1771, ed. Andrew David (London: Hakluyt Society, 1988) 250 9.1b Identifiable islands on Tupaia’s chart. Drawn by Emily Brissenden 251

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Preface Claude Lévi-Strauss Translated by Marie Salaun

It is with great pleasure that I seize the opportunity to express my admiration and reiterate my old and faithful friendship to Marshall Sahlins. World-renowned as a master in Polynesian studies, Sahlins is also the object of a special gratefulness among his French colleagues. For many years, frequent visits to France have allowed him to become one of the best experts on their work. He has been a link between French and North American academics. He has helped them to mutually better understand each other. To illustrate Marshall Sahlins’s gift for synthesis, we shall remember how his reinterpretation of Polynesian historical facts has allowed him to overcome the often-misleading dichotomy between structure and event. Today’s anthropology is often tempted by postmodernism, constructivism, etc. In his writings as well as in his lectures, Sahlins has always known how to put anthropology back on the right track. He now stands as a sage among anthropologists, maybe the last one, which gives even more value to his recommendations.

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Introduction: The Work of Marshall Sahlins, So Far

Introduction A Practice of Anthropology – The Work of Marshall Sahlins, So Far Alex Golub, Daniel Rosenblatt, and John D. Kelly It is time to add Marshall Sahlins to the short list of great anthropologists, time to celebrate his contributions to the discipline, and time to discuss the far-reaching impact of his works. Sahlins has proved a more difficult (and diffident) subject for celebratory synthesis than many of his peers. The works of Eric Wolf (Abbink and Vermeulen 1992), Louis Dumont (Heesterman 1985), and others have received the attention they deserve, and the paeans for Clifford Geertz began even before his unfortunate passing in 2006 (Ortner 1999, Shweder and Good 2005). The most important anthropologist of the period after the Second World War, Claude Lévi-Strauss, was the subject of intense scholarly discussion for decades before his centenary in 2008. Yet the way in which discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s early works has drawn attention away from his later ones may have contributed to Sahlins’s oft-expressed reluctance to be memorialized before he was finished having his say. And so in this volume we come to praise – but not to bury – one of the major anthropologists of the post-war period, Marshall Sahlins. What are Sahlins’s contributions to anthropology? It is a harder question to answer than may at first appear. His 1972 book Stone Age Economics established much of the basic framework of contemporary economic anthropology, but when hundreds of scholars gathered at the American Anthropological Association meetings in 1997 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the volume, Sahlins quipped

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that they were still “stuck in the stone age.” In her famous article on theory in anthropology since the 1960s, Sherry Ortner (1984) cites Sahlins as one of the founders of “practice theory,” while also admitting that if she had centred her article on the emergence of “history” as a key term in anthropology rather than “practice,” Sahlins would still have been a central figure in her narrative. Economics, history, practice, evolution – Sahlins somehow seems to be at the centre of all of these. Beyond his well-known theoretical innovations, Sahlins has also had a quieter but no-less important influence on thinkers from many areas. In the acknowledgments to her article “The Traffic in Women,” pioneering feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin thanks Marshall Sahlins for “the revelation of anthropology” (1975: 157). In the Pacific, Sahlins’s writings have had an even wider influence: In the 1992 book Anahulu he brought two of the four subfields of anthropology together by collaborating with archaeologist Patrick Kirch to produce a joint history of the Anahulu river valley. In his groundbreaking text “Our Sea of Islands,” anthropologist and novelist Epeli Hau‘ofa credits Sahlins for “convincing me in the end that not all is lost and that the world of Oceania is quite bright despite appearances” (1993: 16). The great Hawaiian scholar Lilikala Kame‘eleihiwa wrote that she owed “a great debt to Marshall Sahlins for his intellectual inspiration and great kindness. An academic of the first order, he is excited by Hawaiians writing about their own history and in my bleakest hours gave me hope. I would never have thought of a doctorate had he not considered my work valuable” (1986: iii) – although she later decided she was “disappointed in Sahlins’s work, because I had mistakenly supposed him to be one of the few foreign academics who had aloha for us,” but he was really one of a “long line of foreign denigrators of Hawaiian society” (1995: 16). Kame‘eleihiwa is far from unique in finding much in Sahlins to disagree with. Indeed, the range and importance of Sahlins’s activities are reflected in the numerous controversies, disputes, and critical engagements in which he has been involved. Sahlins has argued famously with Gananath Obeyesekere over the death of James Cook; with Eric Wolf on the role of Indigenous agency in shaping colonial history; with Nicholas Thomas on the history and theoretical significance of Fijian “begging”; with Marx and other political economists on the determining power of “needs” in structuring social



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life; with socio-biologists on the role of biology in society; with Marvin Harris on the relationship between nutrition and culture; with Thucydides on the role of great men and rational interests in history; with William Arens on the existence of cannibalism; with Montgomery McFate on the appropriateness of anthropological participation in the Iraq War; with Edward Said, George Marcus, and James Clifford on the relationship between representation and power; and with any number of recent anthropologists on whether things like globalization and the emergence of transnational communities should mean the end of “culture” as a central theoretical term and preoccupation for anthropologists. Influential, yes; but certainly controversial as well. One might start trying to understand Sahlins’s thought by turning to that of his students. However, here again one would be disappointed. Despite (or because) having something to say on so many things, Sahlins has not founded a school or a movement. Those who have studied with him know that he considers imitation to be the opposite of flattery – he has too much respect for the particular to insist that his students be subsumed under him. Nevertheless, many of us, including (but hardly limited to) the editors and contributors to this book, have been profoundly influenced by his work. Since he continues to publish today, we expect that influence to continue to take new forms. Even so, we are happy to celebrate and reflect on his work thus far by bringing together these essays. An influential scholar with no organized school, an intellectual who has been both deeply oppositional to some paradigms and foundational in others – it is difficult to grasp the totality of Marshall Sahlins’s impact and the underlying connections of his important, powerful, and varied arguments. In order to do so, this introduction begins to synthesize Sahlins’s work by tracing some of his transformations across time and space. While we have no pretensions to venturing serious intellectual biography, we do hope to provide an account that contextualizes the chapters in this volume, and that will provide a coherent description of an author who has been cited, analyzed, attacked, addressed, lauded, contested, and defended, but rarely simply described. One common summation of Marshall Sahlins’s work is that “in the course of his intellectual career Sahlins has made a transition from materialism to idealism” (Linnekin 1987: 669). “Theoretical adversaries perceive Sahlins as a talented but mercurial-thinker,” wrote

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Linnekin, while “supporters counter that, unlike most scholars, Sahlins is not afraid to change his mind” (ibid.). We, on the other hand, will follow Chevalier in arguing that Sahlins’s thought has shown “extraordinary consistency over a long period” (2005). In what follows we hope to show that Sahlins’s shifts of position are due to his attempt to clarify the meaning and implications of the culture concept. Not a dogmatic structure, then, but a certain practice of anthropology can be discerned in Sahlins’s writings. Humanistic, logically rigorous, richly empirical, and generalizing, Sahlins’s practice of anthropology represents a vision of our discipline whose lessons could greatly benefit anthropology today. Such, at any rate, is our argument. In what follows we begin with a biographical overview of Sahlins’s thought before turning to the essays in this volume and demonstrating how they speak to themes in Sahlins’s thought, and to each other.

Biographical Overview of Marshall Sahlins’s Thought Early Years – From Chicago to Michigan to New York: 1930–1953 Marshall Sahlins grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in a middle-class neighbourhood on the west side of Chicago, the son of RussianJewish immigrants.1 Too young to participate in the Second World War, he attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he became a student and protegé of Leslie White. White was “one of those maverick intellectuals and politicians, like Thorstein Veblen, Charles Beard and Robert La Follette, who came out of the rural American heartland to off the pieties-and powers-that-be” (Sahlins 2008b). The power-that-was in anthropology during White’s early career was Franz Boas, who reinvented American anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century. White was a student of Edward Sapir, but hardly considered himself a Boasian. Boas favoured the close study of individual cases, something he inherited from the bourgeois German Romantic tradition (Bunzl 1996), while White was an Anglo-Protestant who sought to build a general science of social evolution. Of course, White had WASP contemporaries such as Mead and Benedict who were also interested in moving beyond particularism, but they came from



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affluent East Coast backgrounds. White, in contrast, grew up on the farm and was committed to a populist radical socialism. Mead and Benedict saw their work as building on Boas’s legacy, while White saw his recuperating a tradition that started with Lewis Henry Morgan. Sometimes things got personal: White referred to Boas’s prose style as “corny” in no less a venue than the American Journal of Sociology (1947: 372), while Lowie (1960) referred to White’s work as “a farrago of immature metaphysical notions” (411), shaped by “the obsessive power of fanaticism [which] unconsciously warps one’s vision” (413). As White’s student, then, Sahlins learned about Boasian anthropology in order to repudiate it. In its place, White built a generalizing science of “culturology,” which according to Sahlins, “somehow accommodated the irreconcilable combination of a positivist materialism and a foundationalist symbolism” (Sahlins 2000c: 11). Early on, then, Sahlins was introduced to a problematic that would shape his thinking: how could culture be both an epiphenomenon of deeper economic structure and an autonomous force that determined social life and profoundly shaped human action? It was a question he would spend much of his career attempting to answer. Sahlins received a bachelor of arts degree and a master of arts degree in anthropology at Michigan under White, and in 1952 he went to Columbia to study for a doctorate. Although Boas founded the Department of Anthropology there, by 1952 Boasians such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead had been marginalized by the university’s administration and a series of imported department chairs. The most important for our purposes here was Julian Steward, who chaired the department from 1946 to 1952 (Manners 1996: 329). A student of Kroeber and Lowie, Steward combined natural history with Boasian anthropology to study how culture adapted to the environment. Although he had departed for the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign by the time Sahlins arrived at Columbia, Steward left behind him a large cohort of students including Eric Wolf, Sydney Mintz, Robert Murphy, Stanley Diamond, and Morton Fried. Many of these men were later hired into the department. Sahlins found an environment at Columbia, then, that shared strong affinities with White’s culturology. Fried served as the chair of Sahlins’s dissertation committee. While there was diversity within this group, there were important similarities, as well. They were “all some shade of red” (Wolf in Friedman 1987: 109) and read

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Steward’s cultural ecology – influenced more by the work of field naturalists and geologists than Marx – through a leftist lens. They also read leftists such as Owen Lattimore and Karl Wittfogel (by then a reactionary right-winger), whose materialist and generalizing approaches extended Marxism to the study of Asian and Middle Eastern societies. Comparative and intellectually adventuresome, their leftist approach dealt with the nitty-gritty of political economy. A second major influence on Marshall Sahlins at Columbia was the historian Karl Polanyi (Harvey et al. 2007, Congdon 1991, Levitt 2006). Born in 1886, Polanyi was a member of Hungary’s bourgeoisie whose generation sought spiritual renewal and intellectual revival in the face of a stifling national culture of Christian patriotism. He fled Hungary after the communist revolution there in 1919, eventually ending up in North America where he wrote his masterpiece, The Great Transformation (1957). This book demonstrated that the emergence of market-based societies in modern Europe was historically contingent and not inevitable. In 1952 Polanyi used Ford Foundation money to create a seminar on economic history that eventually resulted in the collected volume Trade and Market in the Early Empire (1957). The seminar examined the historical origins of the market by examining trade across time and space, and Polanyi’s critique of the “market mentality” (best seen in Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies, a collection of his essays published in 1968) would provide much of the intellectual foundation of Sahlins’s later critique of political economy in both its Smithian and Marxian forms. Sahlins’s 1954 dissertation, Social Stratification in Polynesia (published in 1958), synthesized White’s evolutionary theory, Steward’s cultural ecology, and Polanyi’s substantivist economics. He argued that Polynesia provided a natural laboratory to test theories of cultural evolution because the culture of Polynesian voyagers was an independent variable while the environment on which they settled varied from island to island. Sahlins concluded that “social structure was functionally adjusted to the technological exploitation of the environment” (1958: ix). Taking his lead from a popular (but at the time unpublished) article by Paul Kirchoff (1955), Sahlins argued that the “conical clans” Kirchoff described – which appeared in Polynesia in the form of chiefly lineages – were a transitional stage between egalitarian societies and more stratified ones. With the publication of his dissertation, Marshall Sahlins established himself as a figure in the new, generalizing approaches to evolution, economics, and politics that were rapidly becoming central to the discipline.



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Social Stratification has several features that became characteristically Sahlins: It was focused on the Pacific, which he would study for the rest of his career. Topically, it was focused on kinship and politics – or, rather, the point at which one turned into the other – and their relationship to economics. This was also the first of the many comparative studies that Sahlins would make over the years. Economics and Evolution: 1953–1969 Like the work of many students in the 1950s, Sahlins’s dissertation was based on library research. Shortly after defending Social Stratification, he undertook his first field-based project: a study of “culture and nature” on the island of Moala in Fiji, which was the beginning a lifelong connection with that country. On his return to the United States from Fiji in 1956 he was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan and served there in Leslie White’s department, where he remained until 1972 when he moved to the University of Chicago. In the lates 1960s, Sahlins spent two crucial years in Paris. This was the period in which Sahlins’s early thought matured. Michigan was flourishing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The university had handled the post-war influx of students and money much more successfully than had Columbia (Hollinger 1998), and retirements and growth had led to the hiring of young and ambitious professors such as Mervyn Meggitt and Eric Wolf. Evolution was growing in popularity nationally. Leslie White, once a voice crying in the wilderness, was even elected to the presidency of the American Anthropological Association in 1964. Evolution and adaptation had become mainstream. Marshall Sahlins quickly became central to much of this work, publishing on a wide variety of topics, including primate behaviour – in “Social Life of Monkeys, Apes, and Primitive Man” (1959). As a four-field anthropologist interested in evolution, it makes sense that Sahlins would attempt to resolve “the problem of distinguishing humanity from other primates” (Sahlins 2009a). Much as he had synthesized the literature on Polynesia, Sahlins now worked through the literature on primate behaviour and hunter-gatherers. In “The Origin of Society” (1960c) he argued that “comparison of primate sociology with the findings of anthropological research immediately suggests a startling conclusion: The way people act, and probably have always acted, is not the expression of inherent human nature … Human social life is culturally, not biologically,

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determined” (77). Culturally, not biologically determined: Here we see clearly Sahlins’s indebtedness to Polanyi and White and their debunking of American beliefs in the naturalness of individualism and the market. Here we see clearly that the theme of the cultural determination of behaviour runs through Sahlins’s career in both his “materialist” and “idealist” phases. The question at issue was what causes culture itself. This article also sees Sahlins arguing that Hobbes’s “famous fantasy of a war of ‘all against all’ in the natural state could not be further from the truth” (1960c: 82). Rather, he argued that it is non-human primates who could be said to exhibit Hobbes’s war of all against all. Human behaviour, in contrast, is organized by culture. It was the beginning of an opposition to Hobbes that would characterize Sahlins’s career. Indeed, this is the same critique of Hobbes that we find in The Western Illusion of Human Nature (2008d), a half-century later. Better known from this period is Sahlins’s work on “substantivism”: the idea, originating from Polanyi, that economic processes are embedded in kinship and political systems. Although he did produce a few papers in the Whitean mode explaining the ecological origins of cultural practices such as Easter Island moai, in “Esoteric Efflorescence in Easter Island” (1955), and the segmentary lineage system (Sahlins 1961), the bulk of Sahlins’s work in this period argued for the irrevocably cultural nature of the structure of kinship systems and distributive mechanisms. His focus at this time was thus not the adaptation of culture to the environment, but rather the variety of mechanisms through which harmony, rather than a Hobbesian war of all against all, came to be characteristic of human social life. This can be seen clearly in Moala (1962a), the ethnography that came out of Sahlins’s Fijian fieldwork. Moala, along with Anahulu (co-authored with Patrick Kirch), are the longest pieces that Sahlins has written. Moreover, Moala is the only ethnography based on “traditional” immersive long-term fieldwork – at least to date. Sahlins uses Steward’s concept of “levels of sociocultural integration” to organize his discussion of life on the island of Moala from the household level to Moala’s articulation with Fiji as a whole. While the volume is (as its dust jacket says) “frankly evolutionary,” its focus is on kinship and social structure – particularly the kindred. Culture is seen as an “adaptive organization,” but the articulation between



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culture and the environment is not the main topic of Moala. Unlike the work done by ecological anthropologists such as his classmate Andrew Vayda, Sahlins spends little time dealing with the flora and fauna of the island, energetics, or agricultural production. Rather, Moala’s key innovation is a refusal to “compartmentaliz[e] the ethnographic data under the usual categorical rubrics: ‘technology,’ ‘economics,’ ‘kinship,’ ‘political organization,’ ‘law,’ ‘ritual,’ and so forth” (1962a: 4). Instead the goal is to see what these things look like when they are not “disembedded” (Polanyi’s term) from the kinship system as they are in “civilized” societies. We should not, then, overemphasize the evolutionary and adaptive dimensions of Sahlins’s early work. Despite being written in his most “evolutionary” moment, Sahlins’s Fijian ethnography is more concerned with what happens to food once it gets into a culture system rather than with how it got there. Indeed, much of his work during this period focused on kinship, for example, his “Remarks on Social Structure in Southeast Asia” (1963a). Fiji sits right on the divide between the culture areas of Polynesia and Melanesia, and it may be that this fact, as well as the work of Sahlins’s colleague Thomas Harding in Papua New Guinea, led Sahlins to publish one of his best-known articles, “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief” (1963b). Here Sahlins again summarizes the literature on political organization in Polynesia and Melanesia in order to derive two ideal types of political leadership – the Melanesian “big-man” and the Polynesian “chief.” It is typically encyclopedic and synthetic work, but it marked a shift in Sahlins’s authorial voice: humorous, polemic, practical, and elegant. This shift to a stillrigorous but more artfully written style can also be seen in his book reviews for Scientific American, especially that of Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis (1962b), and still more adventurous is “African Nemesis: An Off-Broadway Review,” (1964a) written in the form of a play. Stylistically, Sahlins was coming into his own. For someone building a natural science of society, “Poor Man, Rich Man” seemed remarkably willing to eschew scientism. In that piece, Sahlins famously employed a method of “uncontrolled comparison” – “reading the monographs and taking notes” (1963b: 285) – very different from that of the lab scientist. The scope of vision and ease of reading made Sahlins’s article one of the most influential in Pacific anthropology, eliciting dozens of papers and books that played off his title. In retrospect, Sahlins’s distinction

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between the Melanesian big-man and Polynesian chief has not withstood scholarly scrutiny (for a good overview, see Roscoe 2000), but Sahlins’s willingness to generalize moved the field forward – indeed, it is a sign of his influence that his findings spurred the creation of a body of work rigorous enough to question his conclusions. In this period Sahlins also cemented his reputation as a theorist of cultural evolution. Social Stratification’s reconciliation of White and Steward was incomplete. White’s evolutionism was rooted in Victorian notions of improvement and progress, while Steward’s was aligned to the evolutionary synthesis in contemporary biology, focused as it was on non-teleological adaptation to particular environments (Smocovitis 2012). How to reconcile Whitean evolutionas-progress with Steward’s evolution-as-adaptation? These were the issues that Sahlins approached in his essay “Evolution: Specific and General” (1960a) in the small, influential volume Evolution and Culture (Sahlins, Service, and Harding 1960) which exemplified the Michigan approach to evolution. Here, Sahlins argued that societies could be understood in terms of either their adaptation to a specific environment or the general level of complexity they had achieved. Additionally, Sahlins emphasized that all of these processes are historical, and none imply that “primitive” people lack moral worth. With this reconciliation, Sahlins laid claim to a leading role in the shaping of the new evolutionary anthropology. During his years in Michigan, Sahlins was also on the forefront of politics, another of his hallmarks. With Eric Wolf and others, Sahlins organized – indeed, invented – the “teach-in” as a method of protest against the Vietnam War. He wrote actively against academic collaboration with the military, and even visited Vietnam to write about the atrocities committed there (1966a, 1966c). These efforts reflected a deep commitment to morality and activism, which Sahlins maintains to this day. The peace movement also affected his thinking about social life. White’s insistence that human behaviour is culturally determined seemed increasingly far-fetched during this time of rapid social change. The question of human agency and its relation to social structure was quietly added to Sahlins’s intellectual project, to become increasingly central to his writings as time went on. By the mid-1960s, however, Sahlins was getting tired of Michigan. Developing intellectually was difficult while serving under his mentor White, the anti-war movement was becoming simultaneously radicalized and infiltrated by the FBI, and Sahlins increasingly felt he was doing more organizing and less anthropology. In 1966 he



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attended a conference on kinship organized by Maurice Godelier and George Murdock at Lévi-Strauss’s laboratoire in Paris and was well received. An invitation to visit France for a year soon followed and Sahlins accepted. Culture as a Sui Generis Force: 1969–1976 Sahlins liked France and his initial one-year appointment at the famous sixth section of the École des Hautes Études was extended; he spent an additional year as a faculty member at Nanterre. This time abroad gave Sahlins time to develop, especially as a prose stylist. More and more in his work, he would adopt abrupt changes of register, shifting from big-shouldered to soigné in the course of a paragraph. However, style was just the tip of the iceberg for Sahlins’s work during this important period. In truth, we should not overplay the differences between the United States and France. Sahlins left anti-war protests in the United States only to arrive in Paris at the start of the explosive protests of May 1968. France was in the midst of a period of exceedingly creative and productive turmoil. The intellectual debates of the time no doubt seemed familiar to Sahlins: Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, for instance, bore a family resemblance to White’s culturology. LéviStrauss resembled White in other ways, as well: inspired by but not beholden to Boas, focused on kinship, wide in vision but fond of ethnographic particularity, and, above all, not afraid to write well. What’s more, in Paris the reconciliation of Marxism and structuralism seemed an urgent project – the Gallic analogue, as it were, of Sahlins’s own attempt to reconcile the material and symbolic sides of White’s legacy. Some see Sahlins’s Parisian interlude as the point at which he was irrevocably transformed from a “materialist” to an “idealist,” but this is too simple. After all, it was in Paris that Sahlins developed the essays that would later become Stone Age Economics (1972). The apogee of his substantivist work, “The Original Affluent Society,” for instance, appeared first (in French) in Les Temps Modernes (1968b), and “The Spirit of The Gift” (also in French) appeared in L’Homme (1968c). Indeed, it was in this period that the long essay, carefully honed, became Sahlins’s favourite form. Many of the essays in Stone Age Economics were destined to become classics, and “The Original Affluent Society,” the first essay in that book, is perhaps the best-known piece Sahlins has written. It is

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classic Sahlins: the encyclopedic synthesis of existing research, a Polanyi-White opposition to Western illusions of human nature, and a refined, elegant style. But whereas “Poor Man, Rich Man” relegated most of its scholarly apparatus to long footnotes, here Sahlins delved deep to produce quantitative data, juxtaposed quotations from primary sources, and supplied a large bibliography to lend proof to his claim. His point was that hunter-gatherers have more leisure time because their cultures are not predicated on the premise of infinite need. In making it, Sahlins meant to invert images of primitive starvation and desperation, but he also made another point: a close analysis of the data reveal the truth, but that truth is obscured by the cultural assumptions of previous writers. It was the beginning of an approach that sought culture logic not only in the ethnographic material Sahlins examined, but in the motivations of his scholarly opponents. That Sahlins’s writings evoked other forms of received wisdom – on the ecological nobility of natural man, for instance, or that contemporary Indigenous populations are more or less relics of an earlier stage of social evolution – no doubt added to the piece’s appeal. The six years after his time in Paris and the publication of Culture and Practical Reason (1976b) marked several shifts in Sahlins’s career. The first was areal: In 1970 Sahlins began a major new research project in Hawai‘i, visiting Honolulu as a fellow at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, and thus adding a second field site at the other end of the Polynesian triangle from Fiji. This was also the time when Sahlins connected with historians of the Pacific in both Hawai‘i and Australia. Finally, it was during this time that Sahlins left Michigan. In 1972 he moved back to Chicago, his hometown, where he took up a position at the University of Chicago that he would hold for over a quarter century. These new influences invited Sahlins to think more thoroughly about the relation between culture, environment, economics, and history. His focus on the determination of human action by culture remained unchanged: culture determines action, not the appetitive desire or utilitarian calculation of individual actors. But what determines culture? Crude materialists such as Marvin Harris insisted that culture is an adaptation to the natural environment, while Lévi-Strauss argued that cultural structures are shaped by their own internal logics. White seemed to believe both things simultaneously. Which is it?



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An adequate answer, Sahlins felt, must “motivate” (as structuralists put it) or explain the particulars of ethnographic fact – another hallmark of his thought. In an interesting but little-read review of Lévi-Strauss’s work published in Scientific American before his time in Paris, Sahlins had submitted that Lévi-Strauss was wrong to argue that “empirically ascertained relations between relations and groups are illusory” (1966b: 132). Privileging invisible, ingeniously conceived structures did not satisfy “that incurable addiction to empirical explanation one sees in certain anthropologists” (133). In other words, Sahlins’s early quarrel with structuralism was that it drifted away from the evidence. After Paris, Sahlins felt structuralism provided exactly the sort of empirical explanation he sought – and provided it more thoroughly than evolutionary approaches. Here we see continuity in the criteria Sahlins uses to evaluate theories, as well as in the questions he asks. His changing answers reflect a continuity of thought, not a shift. Thus, in an early essay, “Esoteric Efflorescence in Easter Island” (1955), Sahlins attempted to explain the existence of moai (monumental stone heads found on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island), with reference to “cultural [i.e., social structural] and environmental factors,” but admitted that “without more specific information about the role of the statues in the entire culture than is available, the question of heads instead of bodies, or why human images rather than animal, cannot be definitively answered” (1046). From his post-Paris vantage point, Sahlins must have felt that materialism could only explain that something would be made, but not what. Sahlins’s Culture and Practical Reason (1976) decisively settled these questions for him. In a 1977 essay, Sahlins argued that the environment is “neither a specific determination nor a sufficient explanation” of culture (15). No compromise was logically consistent: if “practical reason” does not determine culture in toto (which it does not) then culture must be a sui generis force. Culture and Practical Reason remains Sahlins’s most explicitly “theoretical” work to date: the encyclopedic rigour that Sahlins brought to bear on earlier ethnographic studies was now used to address a variety of thinkers ranging from Habermas and Lukács to Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. Above all, the book was an engagement with Marx: it was an attempt to assess whether historical materialism or cultural anthropology could better understand human societies. While many of his colleagues argued that one could be either a materialist or an idealist,

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Sahlins argued a well-developed theory of culture could transcend this opposition itself. This is Sahlins’s most explicitly “culturalist” work but its themes are ones that Sahlins had pursued for decades. Throughout this period Sahlins continued producing Polanyian critiques of naive views of human nature, such as The Use and Abuse of Biology (1976d), his devastating critique of sociobiology. By now Sahlins believed that a critique of Hobbes has to be generalized into a critique of economistic thought itself, including of narrowly Marxist anthropologists. This approach is exemplified by Sahlins’s review of Harris’s account of Aztec cannibalism in “Culture as Protein and Profit” (1978b), which is unflinching in its insistence that (as he would put it in a later piece) cannibalism is always “symbolic” even when it is “real”: whatever energetic role human cannibalism has played in the human diet, that role by itself is not sufficient to explain the elaborate cultural forms that have surrounded it. But if the evidence clearly demonstrated that cannibalism is not the result of dietetic needs, what motivated Harris’s belief that it is? Sahlins argued that the idea had cultural appeal: it fit Harris’s deep-seated utilitarianism. Thus, Sahlins claimed his model could explain not only Aztec cannibalism better than cultural materialism, but also it could explain the cultural origins of Harris’s own analysis. Sahlins’s emphasis on the ethnographic minutiae of cannibalism and his rigorous, close reading of Harris’s argument exemplify his more general claims about the nature of culture and the duties of a rigorous anthropology. The Structure of the Conjuncture: 1976–1985 By the mid-1970s Sahlins had taken the problematics he inherited from White, Polanyi, and others and arrived at a sui generis account of culture. Now at Chicago, he would spend the next decade examining the implications that this model of culture had for causation and explanation in anthropology. Earlier in his career, Sahlins relied on the “layer cake” models of causation popular with evolutionary anthropology: the environment on the bottom as the prime mover, social structure above it and adapted to it, and ideology or “culture” as the frosting on top. If, however, culture is a sui generis force, then this account of the relation between these orders of determination can no longer be accurate. So how are they related? Sahlins’s answer to this question, the “structure



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of the conjuncture,” received its first presentation in “The State of the Art in Social/Cultural Anthropology” (1977), and he continued to develop it until it received a full portrait in Islands of History (1985a). Throughout this period, he tied this new model to the ethnographically exemplary case of the death of Captain Cook (see, e.g., Sahlins 1982a), and to historical anthropology more broadly. This meant dealing with “the relation between individual action and the cultural order” (Sahlins 1982b: 35). White had a strongly deterministic account of human action and so did structuralism, which “seemed … to exclude individual action and worldly practice, except as they represented the projection or ‘execution’ of the system in place” (Sahlins 1981a: 3). Yet, one could not live through the massive social changes of the 1960s and 1970s without believing that human beings could change the world. How, then, to understand agency without dismissing culture? Sahlins’s solution draws on Sartre’s Search for a Method (1963). Sartre sought to reconcile an existentialist commitment to human freedom with the Marxist argument that human beings are determined by their relation to the means of production; Sahlins’s solution was to argue that human beings have the agency to pursue their own existential projects, but that those projects are always expressed in the medium of a particular, determined situation that forms the context for those projects. Sartre was searching for a method, while Sahlins had just purified an object – a culture concept sufficiently robust to escape from the “practical theories” that reduced culture to “the social realization of a gainful ratio of material benefits to cost” (Sahlins 1977: 15). In response to Sartre’s question, “Do we have today the means to constitute a structural, historical anthropology?” (1963: xxxiv), Sahlins’s answer was a firm “yes”: “le jour est arrivé” (Sahlins 1985a: 72). Just as Sartre argued that “man is characterized above all by his going beyond a situation, and by what he succeeds in making of what he has been made” (1963: 91), so Sahlins argued that “life in society is not an automatic genuflection before the superorganic being but a continuous rearrangement of its categories in the project of personal being” (1982b: 42). No projects without a cultural background, but no worldly execution of culture without specific projects. Like Sartre, Sahlins insisted that humans always have a uniqueness and ability to choose which is the result of their particularity as individuals (although unlike Sartre, Sahlins

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never used psychoanalysis to examine the formation of personality through history). Sahlins had French influences other than Sartre. Although Sahlins occasionally gestured to Bourdieu as an influence on his thought, which is something that authors such as Sherry Ortner (1984) have made much of, it was Fernand Braudel’s Annales school of history from which Sahlins drew many of his ideas. Braudel viewed history as acting at different speeds, ranging from the actions of kings to much slower, geographical time that produced the seas and mountains that Braudel believed have fundamentally shaped human history. Sahlins borrowed the Annales sense of history as a conjuncture of different temporal rhythms to replace a layer-cake model with an image of intersecting, multiply paced causal forces that combine in unpredictable ways. Yet, while Braudel’s focus on the longue durée “devalue[s] the unique event in favor of underlying recurrent structures” (Sahlins 1985a: 72), Sahlins’s version of history rose “from the abstract structure to the explication of the concrete event” (ibid.). Sahlins’s model of cultural action involves three moments: (1) instantiation, when general cultural structures realize themselves in particular situations whose very uniqueness offers a surfeit of reality that exceeds the category that subsumes them; (2) denouement, when history actually takes place in ways that may vary from the ideal structure; and (3) totalization, when the innovative use of structures in particular situations feeds back into the more general structures, altering them. The uniqueness of each event is due to the fact that it is a “structure of the conjuncture,” a nexus at which different orders of determination (cultural, meteorological, geographical) come together in ways that determine all of them, but which none totally determine. Further, as we shall see later, these moments of conjuncture create spaces of agency for different people in different ways. How ought one study these conjunctures? Boas, in Race, Language, and Culture (1982), famously advocated for “cosmography,” the idea that “the aim of science … is the investigation of phenomena themselves” rather than “the discovery of general laws” (641). Sahlins’s goal (he claimed in Culture in Practice) was a “cosmography of symbolic forms” (2000c: 31) – since cultural structures at any one point in time are the outcome of history, and their proper explanation is a particularizing, historical account of their transformations, a sort of Boasian culture history redux.



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As a result Sahlins turned to history, producing relatively few encyclopedic syntheses in this period. Mostly. In fact, his works during this period continue to make ideal-typical, generalizing distinctions between (for instance) prescriptive and performative societies, heroic versus narrative history, and the ideal type of the strangerkings in the Pacific. Although Sahlins claimed his empirical goal was now historical explanation, it seems generalizing synthesis was a hard thing for him to give up. Sahlins’s turn to particularity was enabled by the “discovery that peoples of the Pacific I had studied indeed had a history” (1985a: xviii). In Australia he found people such as James Davidson arguing in the new Journal of Pacific History (founded in 1966) that culture “contact has been two-sided. The reaction to it of non-European peoples has been in terms of the values and institutions of their own cultures … for a full understanding … the historian must analyze situations from both points of view” (Davidson 1966: 9–10). Here was a conjuncture to examine! And in Hawai‘i Sahlins worked with scholars like Dorothy Barrère (see Sahlins and Barrère 1973) who showed him the “archival abundance” (Sahlins 1985a: xviii) of the Pacific islands, and Greg Dening, who was experimenting with new forms of writing historical anthropology. The archival record – a record of colonialism – also helped Sahlins to resolve the issue of culture contact. In Moala Sahlins recognized that “intercultural contact” is “one of the two major selective forces that have shaped Moalan life,” arguing that “a society responds adaptively to cultural influences directed upon it from the outside, just as it responds to natural influences. Logically, there is no reason to exclude culture contact … from the study of cultural adaptation … no more than a biologist would ignore the effects of competitors when studying the adaptation of species” (Sahlins 1962a: 14). In his short textbook Tribesmen, Sahlins noted that an account of ecological adaptation should be complemented by “another, at least of equal length, on the relations of tribes to coexisting societies and the modifications in organization thus occasioned. Unfortunately, this has been a neglected branch of ecological research” (1968d: 44–5). A theory of the structure of the conjuncture, combined with rich archival material, now made an account of culture contact possible, and this is what Sahlins turned to next. The centrepiece for his new method was an analysis of the death of Captain Cook, an example he presented briefly in the mid-1970s (Sahlins 1975), and then

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refined in a French collection (1979), before developing it more fully in Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981a) and finally Islands of History (1985a). Sahlins was not the first person to tell Cook’s story – the Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau had done so one hundred and twenty years earlier (Silva 2004: 17–20). But the death of Cook provided a way to show that Sahlins’s new approach connected the diverse pieces of his argument: individual agency, the conditioning power of cultural structures, the ironies of culture contact, and the unpredictable nature of history and the structure of the conjuncture. According to Sahlins, Cook’s death was the result of a chance series of events that were rendered meaningful by the cultural contexts in which they occurred: Cook’s arrival in Hawai‘i during the makahiki season led some Hawaiians to see him as an incarnation of the deity Lono, but his return to the islands after experiencing a storm at sea violated Hawaiian expectations – as did his behaviour when he returned. The final irony of Cook’s death was his dual apotheosis: in both British and Hawaiian culture, he was considered more than merely human. Anahulu and Obeyesekere: 1985–1992 The period between 1985 and 1992 was largely one of consolidation for Sahlins. Islands of History was very favourably reviewed. In an extremely influential piece, Sherry Ortner (1984) put Sahlins (along with Bourdieu) centre stage as a definitive solution to the ongoing tension between structure and agency. Islands of History was also warmly received by Hawaiian scholars, such as HaunaniKay Trask, who wrote that Sahlins had written “a remarkable, indeed beautiful, book” that “deserves to be celebrated” (1985: 787). There were also criticisms. Some Marxists considered Sahlins a turncoat idealist and argued that Islands of History seemed devoid of analysis of power, political economy, and colonialism – the very things at the centre of, for instance, Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History, which was published around the same time. Others argued that Sahlins’s model did not allow for “endogenous” change and that, on his account, only in certain unusual cases of external forces would cultures transform. Despite – or perhaps because of – this attention, Sahlins once again became central to anthropological debates. Islands of History used the microdynamics of a single encounter to make a theoretical point. Yet the microdynamics of a single encounter



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were not really the same thing as a full-length historical study. Thus, in 1983 Sahlins began a large NSF-funded team project with Patrick Kirch, Jocelyn Linnekin, and others to produce a full-blown ethnography that exemplified his historical approach. The result, Anahulu, was published in 1992. What Moala was to Sahlins’s evolution-based Fiji research, Anahulu was to Hawai‘i and his project of historical anthropology. Taking the question of cultural contact beyond the moments of initial encounter, Anahulu attempted to chart the course of the Hawaiian engagement with the West, arguing that Hawaiians neither “resisted” nor “submitted” to colonialism. Rather, they interpreted Western imperialism in culturally specific ways and integrated them into their own cultural system with consequences that could not have been predicted simply by the nature of the forces from outside. The book, in two volumes, is extraordinarily detailed and comprehensive. Anahulu was a critical success, winning the 1998 Stanley Prize. But it has not been as widely read as Islands of History. For one thing, it is a specialist work on Hawaiian history, and non-specialists looking for a quick summary of Sahlins’s theoretical innovations were disappointed. The book was also not well received by the Hawaiian studies community. As a visiting professor at the Center for Pacific Island Studies, Sahlins had helped encourage and support Hawaiian scholars like Lilikala Kame‘elehiwa and Davianna McGregor, and others. Now, however, they found his portrayal of post-contact Hawai‘i offensive for the way it emphasizes the mobility of Hawaiians (rather than their rootedness in the land) and for its portrayal of Hawaiian nobility as greedy elites who exploited commoners during the sandalwood era. But the biggest impediment for Anahulu’s reception has undoubtedly been Gananath Obeyesekere’s 1992 book The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, whose criticism of Sahlins’s work on Cook drew attention away from Anahulu and back to Sahlins’s work in the 1980s. Others had taken issue with the historical details of Sahlins’s analysis of Hawaiian history (e.g., Bergendorff et al. 1988), but Obeyesekere’s volume was a kind of critique that Sahlins had not experienced before: monograph-length, and strongly worded, it came at a time when a rising tide of post-colonial scholarship was taking issue with the epistemological self-confidence of white, privileged academics. The result was the “Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate,” a scholarly exchange conducted largely by Obeyesekere and his reviewers. Sahlins’s single intervention of substance was

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his short book How “Natives” Think (1995); for an overview, see Borofsky (1997), and for a history from a kanaka maoli (indigenous Hawaiian) perspective, see Silva (2004).) Twenty years earlier, Sahlins had outflanked Harris by arguing that a sui generis notion of culture could explain not only Aztec cannibalism, but also Harris’s explanation of Aztec cannibalism. Now the tables were turned: Obeyesekere argued that Sahlins’s explanation of Cook’s death was a result of Sahlins’s own Western “mythmodels” that exoticized the Other. Although argued in the language of ethnohistorical minutiae, the debate was widely followed because it addressed broader disciplinary anxieties about ethics and epistemology. As Geertz noted at the time, “After one reads these two having at one another … whatever happened to Cook, and why, seems a good deal less important … than the questions they raise about how it is we are to go about making sense of the acts and emotions of distant peoples in remote times. What does ‘knowing’ about ‘others’ properly consist in? Is it possible? Is it good?” (1995: 4). In fact, the debate fit awkwardly into existing post-colonial frames. Charles Taylor (1994) has argued that the politics of recognition requires two moments, a “politics of universalism, emphasizing the equal dignity of all citizens” (37) and “a politics of difference … [which] recognize[s] the unique identity of this individual or group, their distinctness from everyone else” (38). In this period it was often the mainstream white academics advocating universalism, with insurgent post-colonial scholars attempting to “provincialize Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000) insisting on the parochial nature of the West’s purportedly universal standards. In fact, it was Obeyesekere who pursued a politics of universalism, emphasizing the coevalness of Hawaiians with “us” (whoever that pronoun denotes) and analyzing Hawaiian action as the expression of universal human nature. Sahlins, in contract, argued that in Obeyesekere’s account “distinctive patterns of belief and action get swallowed up in common Western senses of rationality. Their own scheme of things is resolved into a philosophy of empirical realism that pretends to be human and universal – or else, in other arguments distinctive of ‘natives’ by contrast to Western-colonial mythologists” (Sahlins in Borofsky 1997: 273). Ironically, in this debate it was the third world intellectual who advocated for an Enlightenment universalist position and Sahlins, the “old white man,” who insisted on a politics of radical difference.



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Ultimately, academic attention moved on. By the time Obeyesekere responded to Sahlins in the afterword to the second edition of Apotheosis, in 1997, anthropologists had grown weary of the debate and its often-heated tone. Although there was no final accounting, many felt that Sahlins had won, if only on points. Afterology, Despondency Theory, and the Anthropology of Modernity: 1992–2001 In retrospect, Ortner was wrong to see “practice theory” as the future of anthropology. As the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate showed, theory in the 1990s would instead be focused on crises of representation, ethics, and epistemology associated with the terms “postcolonialism,” “postmodernism,” and “‘post-structuralism” – a group of theories that Sahlins, following Mraz, labelled the “afterologies.” It is probably too simple to lump these diverse approaches under a single label, nonetheless, the label does convey Sahlins’s sense of profound dissatisfaction with these movements. From 1992 to 2001, Sahlins had moved from particularistic historical ethnography to a more general “anthropology of modernity” (for an overview of this, see Robbins 2005), which addresses issues of epistemology and power in the context of the globalizing world of the post–Cold War period. Was the rise of capitalism inevitable? Is cultural specificity disappearing? Can anthropologists speak authoritatively about these topics? In examining these questions – no, no, and yes were his answers – Sahlins sought to challenge the afterologists and continue his dialogue with Marxism. Sahlins’s ethnographic focus in this period expanded to include China. In a paper written during a 1988 visit to Beijing (1990a), Sahlins argued that the Qing Empire’s lack of interest in Western commodities was exemplary of the way that non-Western people could assimilate capitalism into their own cultural schemes, “making modernity the servant of custom, rather than its master” (80). In his Radcliffe-Brown lecture of 1988 Sahlins combined Chinese, Pacific, and Native North American material together to argue that differences in nineteenth-century global capitalism were in each case mediated by pre-existing cosmological cum political structures: ruling chiefs in Hawai‘i and the Northwest coast of America were interested in acquiring different things, for different purposes, and with different consequences (Sahlins 1989b). Global capitalism

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was always locally understood, and was itself transformed by its encounter with other cultural logics. This argument about globalization was meant to apply to the twentieth century as well as the nineteenth. In Tribesmen (1968) Sahlins argued that “modern civilization knows no borders: those curious peoples beyond the pale have been drawn into the main sphere in the course of Europe’s four-century planetary reconnaissance. Once discovered, they were rapidly colonized, baptized, and culturally traumatized … And now, having bit deep into native custom, civilization allows itself the luxury of an intellectual digestion … anthropology … becomes an inquest into the corpse of one society presided over by members of another” (1–2). By the 1990s Sahlins was criticizing this position, not advocating it. He labelled this belief “sentimental pessimism,” part of a broader “despondency theory” (a riff on the “dependency theory” of world system theory), which Sahlins believed was too pessimistic about the chances of Indigenous culture. He now drew on contemporary ethnographic data from Alaska, Papua New Guinea, and other places to demonstrate that, on the contrary, the global trend was toward the “indigenization of modernity”: local people were using the materials of globalization to become “more themselves than ever before.” “Culture,” Sahlins claimed, “is not a disappearing object” (2000b). This was both an empirical generalization and a theoretical riposte. In denouncing the omnipresent force of Western hegemony, Sahlins argued, afterologists implicitly endorsed colonial fantasies of power as real. Furthermore, as their goal shifted from analysis to moral judgment, the work of analyzing the details, Sahlins claimed, was being forgotten. Although he disagreed with dependency theory’s gloomy diagnosis for Indigenous people, Sahlins shared Marxists’ epistemological confidence – he was, in short, willing to speak truth to power. On the other hand, post-colonialism, he believed, “put the very possibility of a historical anthropology – maybe even the possibility of a comparative cultural anthropology – at issue” (Sahlins in Borofsky 1997: 272). Against “poststructuralist litanies about the contested and unstable character of cultural logics” Sahlins argued that “polyphony is not cacophony” (2002b: 27) and that there was “a noncontradictory way … of describing the contradictions, a system of and in the differences” (2000c: 488), since “in order for the categories to be contested at all, there must be a common system of intelligibility” (ibid.).



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Furthermore, Sahlins spent an increasing amount of time arguing that “ethnography has always known that cultures were never as bounded, self-contained, and self-sustaining as postmodernism pretends” (1999c: 411). Sahlins’s publications in this period argued not only for the vitality of local cultures, but that afterologists made a straw man of anthropology. In his own intellectual autobiography (see the introduction to Culture in Practice 2000c) and other works, he helped refresh the discipline’s memory of its past accomplishments and findings. In some senses, Sahlins was swimming against the current in these years. He argued for the value of traditional cultural anthropology and for the vitality of Indigenous people and their cultural projects. These things were not typically paired, since the sentimental pessimism of dependency theory relied on authoritative denouncement of the death of local cultures, and post-colonialism attempted to reclaim the agency of Indigenes by questioning the epistemological authority of first-world scholars. Power, Events, and Human Nature: 2001–2010 Although Sahlins had written for years about power, politics, and individual agency, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan gave these topics new urgency for him: what were the cultural origins of the realpolitik that drove US foreign policy? How could a single event like 9/11 have such incredible repercussions? How could the decisions of a US president have such power to shape the historical record? These were the issues Sahlins took up in this decade, often refracted through his Fijian material. As he dealt with issues of war, empire, and human nature, Sahlins drew on themes from his earlier work, often combining them in new ways with classical ethnographic material. Apologies to Thucydides (2004a) was his main book to come out during this period, but before discussing it let us first discuss its deeper roots in Sahlins’s thought. Marshall Sahlins had always opposed Western misconceptions of human nature, and so it is not surprising that he saw the influence of his bête noir, Hobbes, at work in post-9/11 America. “The American war policy is based upon a certain ethnocentric notion of human nature” (2009a), Sahlins wrote. In this period he returned to work begun in the mid-1990s on “the native anthropology of Western cosmology” in a series of essays designed to sketch out the culture history of the folk theories motivating America’s power

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politics (Sahlins 2005a, 2008d). Having described and defended the genealogy and adequacy of the culture concept, he now described the shape, form, and history of wrong-headed theories of human nature in Western thought. 9/11 was nothing if not an event, and after the turn of the millennium Sahlins returned to the role of events in shaping history. One of the challenges raised to Islands of History was that it had no account of endogenous sources of change. As early as 1991 Sahlins had responded with an important essay entitled “The Return of the Event, Again” which argues that cultural structures sometimes amplify the agency of individuals, who then became a source of novelty that transforms structures. Thus, although Cook was an exogenous force of change in Hawai‘i, whose influence was amplified by his place in Hawaiian and British cultural schemes, in the Fiji wars the chiefs of Bau and Rewa were endogenous sources of change whose agency was amplified by their chiefly status. Sahlins had used ethnography from this Fijian conflict several times before to discuss war and power (see, e.g., “War in the Fiji Islands” 1987), emphasizing the cultural mediation at the heart of even the most punitive force. His essay “The Discovery of the True Savage” (1994a), for instance, examines the story of Charley Savage, the Swedish man who introduced firearms to Fijian warfare. From the outside, Savage’s story appeared straightforward: his “advanced” technology gave tremendous power to its white owners as they colonized Indigenous areas of realpolitik. Sahlins, on the other hand, searched the historical record to discover the “true Savage” – a man whose political force is a result of the cosmopolitical order in Fiji, where chiefly politics are predominant. It was not his weapon, Sahlins argues, but the way it disrupted chiefly battles, that made Savage an important political player. Even the dominance of the colonizer is, in Sahlins’s account, underwritten and shaped by the Indigenous cultural system, and narratives of Western power remain fundamentally a Fijian story. Just as force is culturally mediated, so too is disorder. In publications throughout this period Sahlins compared the events of the Peloponnesian War with the situation in occupied Iraq. These “wars of all against all” were not the result of people stripped down to their basic human nature, but of culturally specific projects of domination of local people. “It takes a lot of culture,” Sahlins quipped, “to make a state of nature” (2011d: 27).



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In fact, Sahlins had long rubbed shoulders with classicists. In graduate school he attended Polanyi’s seminar with Moses Finley. Sahlins also knew Jean-Pierre Vernant and his school, who like Sahlins himself came from Marxist/leftist backgrounds but sought a humanistic structuralist-inflected approach to their material. And finally, at Chicago Sahlins knew scholars such as Nicholas Rudall and James Redfield. Sahlins had dabbled in classical material for some time although much of it remained unpublished (see, e.g., Sahlins 2011a – which was written decades before it was published). The highlight of this work was Sahlins’s 2004 Apologies to Thucydides (helpfully digested in Sahlins 2005e). This volume addresses issues of empire, power, realpolitik, and the amplification of individual agency by triangulating three ethnographic areas: nineteenthcentury Fiji, twentieth-century America, and fifth-century Athens. It is structured as an extended comparison of the Bau-Rewa conflict and the Peloponnesian War. Here, Sahlins moves beyond his old foil Hobbes to one of Hobbes’s decisive influences, Thucydides. Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War was the canonical Western account of political conflict, and Thucydides’s political realism was the forerunner to the versions of economics and political science that shaped American foreign policy. In Apologies Sahlins demonstrated that the paradigmatic Western account of political conflict does not make sense even of the case from which it generalizes: Thucydides did not understand the way culture shaped the Peloponnesian War, a conflict whose viciousness was shaped by Greek cultures of honour, pride, and thalassocracy – the system of “rule by sea” which Greece shared with the Fijian polity of Bau. Why, Sahlins asked, should we use Thucydidean realism in our contemporary social analysis if it could not make sense of Greece? In many ways, however, the most charming part of the book is its sparkling middle section, which discusses the structural amplification of agency in the case of Bobby Thompson’s home run that won baseball’s National League pennant in 1951, and the custody battle over Elián González. Each exemplifies one of two different patterns of amplification: one conjunctural, the other structural. Despite his call for a “cosmography of cultural forms” (2000c: 31), Sahlins still seemed to admit that “there is pleasure too, and some intellectual reward, in discovering the broad patterns” (1963b: 285). Apologies also returned to and enlarged this critique of afterology, now called “Leviathanology,” in order to show the genealogical link

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between Thucydides, Hobbes, and Leviathanology. As part of this he expanded his critique of afterology to include Foucault, whose focus on the ubiquity of power reminded Sahlins of Hobbes’s vision of life as a “war/of all against all” and whose notion of “discourse” seemed to him to posit a determination of social life so encompassing and powerful that it seemed to be Hobbes’s leviathan in postmodern guise. It was during this period that Sahlins, now an emeritus professor, made the move from author to editor when he became the executive publisher of Prickly Paradigm Press. The press – then called Prickly Pear – began in 1993 as a UK-based project of Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw, and had gone through several permutations (the British branch of this scholarly cactus is still alive and well). In 2002 Prickly Paradigm began producing pamphlets that continued Sahlins’s engaged, well-written, and essay-length polemics. Now, more than forty pamphlets later, the press has produced work on contemporary academic politics, as well as cutting-edge theoretical interventions by authors such as David Graeber, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Prickly Paradigm also became a forum for Sahlins to oppose anthropological collaboration with the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly forty years after the teach-ins against Vietnam, Sahlins now found himself arguing against Human Terrain System, the program conducting social science in aid of the occupation which an anthropologist dedicated to helping the military “aim better” (Jacobsen 2008). Sahlins helped support a variety of publications opposed to this sort of work, both in his pamphlet series (González 2009, Network of Concerned Anthropologists 2009, Jacobsen 2009) and more generally (Kelly et al. 2010). Life from Without: 2010– Recently Sahlins’s focus has swung back toward the general and, indeed, the human condition more broadly. In the last few years he has tried to substantiate the “modest claim” that “the elementary forms of kinship, politics and religion are all one” (2008c: 197) because they all involve gaining “life from without” (179). There are several interrelated pieces to this broad claim, and many of them deal with themes that Sahlins had long explored in his writings. The first is the phenomenon of the stranger-king: an



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exogenous ruler who usurps power from autochthons and becomes their leader. In the 1980s Sahlins demonstrated the presence of this ideal type in Polynesian and Indo-European cultures and suggested it had broad applicability to a number of societies. In making this claim that “the political appears here as an aspect of the cosmological” (1985a: 90) Sahlins was opposing “the quaint Western concept that domination is a spontaneous expression of the nature of society, and beyond that, of the nature of man” (75–6). Now, after this point had been amplified in Apologies to Thucydides, Sahlins returned to it, arguing that stranger-kingship was a political form of “global extent and historical range” (2008c: 178). This was so because the underlying dynamic of stranger-kingship is, Sahlins claims, a fundamental structure of the human condition: it involves the “transaction of vitality” from a “potent alterity” to one’s self (2008c: 177). Now Sahlins went on to claim that there are other forms of politics that feature the same dynamic, drawing increasingly not only from Polynesia and China, but the space between them: the wider sphere of “Austronesian” and southeast Asian cultures. Head-hunters, for instance, incorporated outside enemies in order to gain power. Indeed, even in cases of polities ruled by “cosmocraters” whose legitimacy is rooted in the divine orders, acquisition of objects from peripheral spaces is proof of sovereign potency: thus Chinese emperors used tribute from nomadic peoples as proof they enjoyed the Mandate of Heaven. Peripheral people, in turn, often used items from these centres to boost their own internal legitimacy. In contrast to the realpolitik of Thucydides and his successors, Sahlins now claims that only a “real-politics of the marvellous” (2010b: 118) can explain the particularities of actually existing political systems. Two things follow from this: first, that much of economic life could be understood as the search for objects that were valuable because they were remote or “other” (Sahlins 2010b). Additionally, it becomes clear that bounded notions of culture are inadequate to understanding societies, since much of what shaped them involved their interactions with one another. In the 1980s Sahlins demonstrated that structuralism was not ignorant of practice. In the 1990s he argued that anthropology had never considered culture to be “bounded.” Now, Sahlins showed that order was “intercultural” (2010b) and spread across the boundaries of polities and ethnic groups.

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At the root of this focus on alterity is, Sahlins claims, a basis in deeper structures of kinship. In his short book What Kinship Is – And Is Not (2013a) Sahlins argues that kinship is an experience of mutuality and intersubjective identification – an argument that is supported, he argues (2011c: 230–2), by recent work in evolutionary behaviouralism. The use of alterity in religious, economic, and political life is based on a deeper, more primary human experience of mutuality of being: the specieswide sense that kinsfolk “participate intrinsically in each other’s existence” (Sahlins 2013a: ix). Marshall Sahlins has shown no signs of slowing down politically. His two most recent areas of interest focus on the integrity of the academy. First, he took the unusual step of resigning from the National Academy of Science of the United States – one of the most prestigious institutions in American intellectual life – in February 2013 (see Sahlins 2013b). The resignation was a protest against the Academy’s role in furthering American imperialism, and also the election of Napoleon Chagnon to the academy. For Sahlins, Chagnon’s unethical fieldwork and socio-biological approach is a model of how not to conduct research, empirically flawed, and morally dubious. Sahlins has also been vocal in his opposition to the Confucius Institutes (Sahlins 2015b) increasingly present in the American academy. These institutes, funded by the Chinese government but hosted by American universities, are antithetical to academic values, Sahlins maintains, because they present a tendentious image of China and promote censorship and self-censorship similar to the government prohibitions on discussion of politically charged topics in Chinese universities. Amazingly, roughly two decades into his emeritus career, Sahlins is still fashion-forward in theoretical circles. He has been an important supporter of new trends in anthropological publishing and theory. HAU, the first major international peer-reviewed, open-access online journal in anthropology, draws heavily on Marshall Sahlins in its founding theoretical statement (da Col and Graeber 2011), and Sahlins contributed a piece (2011a) to the inaugural issue. HAU is just part of a more general rapprochement between American, British, and French academic traditions that Sahlins has helped support. Sahlins continues to connect English speakers to francophone thought, receiving the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2011 (Harms 2011). In 2014 “ontology” became the buzzword in American anthropological circles, partially because of the roundtable



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“The Ontological Turn in French Philosophical Anthropology” in which Sahlins participated (see Sahlins 2014a) and which John Kelly (a co-editor of this volume) helped organize. In this and in other smaller publications (e.g., Sahlins 2013c) Sahlins continues to influence the discipline of anthropology by promoting the work of others. In mentioning this influence, however, we should not leave the impression that Marshall Sahlins has stopped producing his own work. But having covered Sahlins’s career (so far), let us turn to the essays in this volume and examine how they take up some themes in Sahlins’s work.

Some Structures of the Longue durée , and Their Transformations At the beginning of this essay we claimed that Sahlins’s thought was coherent, even though he contributed to a diverse array of areas. Contra a common narrative that broke his career into an earlier material and a later idealist period, we have endeavoured to demonstrate that Marshall Sahlins has shown considerable intellectual continuity over the course of his career. We now turn to the final task of this introduction: to generalize about some of the structures of the longue durée of Sahlins’s practice of anthropology and to examine how the essays by our authors represent transformations of these structures. As we mentioned at the start of this introduction, Sahlins has never produced a school or clique – there is no “Sahlinsological” approach to anthropology. He has never tried to make himself hegemonic by flooding the job market with graduate students; he disdains imitators; and his rigorous, humanistic anthropology is not doctrinaire. Rather, Sahlins’s influence is that of the atelier – one can see his colleagues developing their own unique styles in the course of their time spent in his workshop. For these reasons, the essays gathered here do not have a program or agenda, but an esprit de corps. The individual chapters are variations on the themes in Sahlins’s work. One fundamental feature of Sahlins’s thought is his demand for ethnographic adequacy. Throughout his career, Sahlins has insisted that we recognize the “specificity and historicity of cultures” (2009a), the full particularity of human lives. Ethnographic facts – and

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they are facts, for Sahlins – are in and of themselves interesting to Sahlins, and he believes that we owe them our attention and the duty to describe them accurately. It is for this reason that he argues that anthropology must be a “cosmography of cultural forms,” a discipline in which “anthropologists rise from the abstract structure to the explication of the concrete event” (1985a: 72). We see this commitment to rich ethnography in nearly all of the chapters in this volume. This sentiment is perhaps best summed up by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha when she writes here that “our most lasting contribution as anthropologists might be – after all is said and done – data, fieldwork, and the stories they unveil. Just that.” In an era where anthropologists are on the lookout for the latest theoretical fad, Sahlins and his colleagues share a commitment to the value of ethnography for ethnography’s sake. A good example of this concern with the particular is Jocelyn Linnekin’s chapter. Her examination of conceptions of kingship in nineteenth-century Samoa reflects several themes in Sahlins’s work: the historical anthropology of the Pacific, the cultural nature of power, and the mediation of colonial power by endogenous cultural structures. The history of imperial intrusion into Samoa, she argues, is one of constant misrecognition of Samoan politico-religious dynamics. Linnekin demonstrates how the notion of a single Samoan “kingship” developed as the result of a conjuncture of culture systems in the course of Samoa’s entanglement with the world system. Through the force of their gaze, however, external “preconceptions” came to have a structuring effect on political struggle in Samoa, albeit an uneven one. At the same time, Linnekin insists, Western pressures were not “hegemony” and Samoan “resistance” to external forces did not have in its armoury only “weapons for the weak.” By painting a finely detailed picture of the constituent inaccuracies in outsider views of kingship and their complex and regimenting effect as they motivated actors to intervene in Samoan chiefly politics, Linnekin avoids lapsing into simplistic discourses of objectivity, oppression, and resistance. By painting a truer, more ethographically adequate, and more ambivalent picture of Samoan history, Linnekin demonstrates the utility of Sahlins’s claim that colonialism is always mediated by the culture of the colonized. Her close reading of Samoan history exemplifies the scrupulous examination of historical record that Sahlins recommends to others, and



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displays the ways in which his culture theory can illuminate this material – all of it – in its particularity. Another constant in Sahlins’s work is humour and a gimlet eye – his ironic, acerbic wit often takes aim at the personal foibles of the colonial forces he examines. He shares this approach with his colleague and historical anthropologist Bernard Cohn (1987). Sahlins, like Cohn, has always been a master of irony, the bemused recognition of the gap between the ideal and its realization – indeed, the structure of the conjuncture is a fundamentally ironic social theory. Kaplan’s essay here continues this tradition with a fine-grained examination of the ironies of ethnography in colonial Fiji, and the way that one colonizer remade himself in the course of representing Fijians. Kaplan’s chapter about The Hill Tribes of Fiji (the book) and the hill tribes of Fiji (the people) provides a pocket biography of the transformation of an expatriate in Fiji from a Jew to a “Roman” – that is, from outsider to exemplar of colonial British rule – while, in the background, a local Fijian religious leader transforms himself from traditional figure to Jewish prophet. Kaplan’s point is made in the middle space where these identities cross: conventional history might enquire into the objective truths that these transformations “obscure” or “hide,” but an ethnographic history (as her opening quote from Sahlins reminds us) takes these transformations as its object. In the end the heart of Kaplan’s essay is a playful indulgence in a particularly juicy bit of particularity, something Sahlins will no doubt appreciate. This focus on the foibles of the colonizers and the agency of the Indigenes need not, however, be restricted to the nineteenth-century Pacific. Carneiro da Cunha’s chapter continues this ironic sensibility by telling the story of the spontaneous rise of the cult of a saint in the Brazilian Amazon, an endogenous appropriation of Catholicism. Many authors have focused on the indigenization of Christianity, but Carneiro da Cunha offers a unique twist on this theme by studying how the church then reappropriated this appropriation. The piece splendidly illustrates how structures are enmeshed in (and indeed, create) power struggles, how their repeated iteration can produce effects that appear, on the surface, to be contradictory – one of Sahlins’s main points against the afterologists. Like Kaplan and Linnekin, Carneiro da Cunha draws on historical records to demonstrate the time depth of the appropriative

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dynamics she describes, even though the case she studies occurs in the present. More fundamentally, however, Carneiro da Cunha’s richly detailed case study demonstrates ethnographers’ need not be apologetic for finding what they study interesting, and how a rigorous, humanistic anthropology can make illuminated moments of ethnographic particularity. This theme of the indigenization of external sources was part of Sahlins’s preoccupation with Indigenous cultural vitality in the early 1990s. We can see it in Carneiro da Cunha’s chapter, as well as in Fienup-Riordan’s. Fienup-Riordan describes the controversy surrounding the construction of a road near a sacred site in Alaska. With Sahlins, she argues that underlying what others might consider a “realpolitik” of interest represents culturally given ends being pursued using culturally given means. Her essay is particularly noteworthy for its demonstration that the “indigenization of modernity” is not a shallow affair. Where some have fastened on relatively superficial signs of difference, Fienup-Riordan convincingly demonstrates that the “past is old and the future is traditional” in a deep and compelling sense. As we hope the reader can see, Fienup-Riordan’s account of Indigenous agency shares important connections with Linnekin’s chapter, even though it takes place in a far-from-tropical location and nearly a century afterwards. The flip side of this demand for ethnographic adequacy is Sahlins’s critique of scholars who develop theories based on their cultural presuppositions rather than the empirical record. As different as they are, Sahlins believes socio-biology, cultural materialism, economics, postmodernism, and afterologies all share the same thing: a willingness to make a “lousy bargain with ethnographic realities, giving up what we know about them in order to study them”; see Waiting for Foucault, Still (2002b: 20). Sahlins often uses Sartre’s language to express this. In Search for a Method Sartre (1963: 28) accuses Marxist authors such as Lukács of “the terrorist practice of ‘liquidating the particularity.’” Indeed, if anything, Sahlins’s work suggests that anthropological particularism is more scientific than a quantitative or nomothetic approach. If the essence of science is an openness to putting one’s cultural conceptions at “risk” in acts of reference to empirical reality, then it is anthropology that has the better track record than those supposed sciences (from economics to socio-biology to Marxism) that amount largely to the projection of Western



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cosmological schemes onto the observed world. Rather than deal with the “equivocal givens of experience” they deal instead with “general particularities” (Sartre 1963: 28). As a result “analysis [on their account] consists solely of getting rid of detail, in forcing the signification of certain events, in denaturing facts or even inventing a nature for them in order to discover it later underneath them, as their substance” (27). Citing Sartre’s image of the “bath of sulphuric acid” that these beliefs throw particularities into, Sahlins (1976d: 15–16) insists that as a result “an understanding of the phenomenon is gained at the cost of everything that we know about it. We have to suspend our comprehension of what it is. But a theory ought to be judged as much by the ignorance it demands as by the knowledge it purports to afford.” We can see this critique of Western cultural models most explicitly in Tcherkézoff’s chapter. The best place to begin is his multiply recursive title. Sahlins has a long history of punning and allusive titles – for instance, he playfully entitled the first chapter of Islands of History “Supplement to the Voyage of Cook,” an allusion to Diderot’s “Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville,” which used Bougainville’s accounts of Polynesians to criticize European sexual morality. In doing so, Sahlins implicitly styled himself the anthropological philosophe drawing lessons from an English, rather than French, explorer. Tcherkézoff’s essay reverses this figure: now it is Sahlins himself who is the great way-finder of historical anthropology and Tcherkézoff’s supplement the scholarly supplement. But like Sahlins and Diderot, Tcherkézoff’s modesty obscures the genuine contribution that he makes. In his chapter Tcherkézoff returns to the sexuality that accompanied many of the first Pacific voyages. Through a close analysis of the written records of two early patrols he reconstructs the cultural dynamic that underlay these early couplings. Tcherkézoff’s account of the politics and power of these lessthan-idyllic encounters fleshes out the dynamics of sexual contact about which the Hawaiian material was often not sufficiently precise. At the same time, Tcherkézoff shows convincingly, as Sahlins would be the first to argue, that these encounters were embedded in and motivated by a cosmological scheme. Tcherkézoff’s piece is a valuable parting shot in the Obeyesekere-Sahlins debate by demonstrating that one need not succumb to Obeyesekere’s model of universal rationality in order to understand the fraught nature of sexual violence in the early modern Pacific.

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Tcherkézoff’s punning title points to another aspect of Sahlins’s work: his allusive, humanistic style. Several chapters in this volume share Sahlins’s and Tcherkézoff’s word play. We can see it in Martha Kaplan’s invocation of the Hill Tribes of Fiji and the Hill Tribes of Fiji, as well as Carneiro da Cunha’s “Chaisé-croisé” (cross-over), a title whose subtitle includes the chiasmic (crossed-over) phrase “Christianity appropriated Indigenous appropriation of Christianity.” Perhaps the best exemplar of the stylistic freedom Sahlins practices, however, is Greg Dening. Dening’s autobiographical narrative traces the course of Pacific history where his life and Sahlins’s intersect and diverge. This is the most reflexive and personal piece in the collection. This intimacy and immediacy is all the more bittersweet given that this was one of the last pieces that Dening wrote before he died. Dening’s essay is the least “scientific” in the volume, both in tone and in argument. In contrast to the story of continuity we have told of Sahlins’s biography, Dening’s own life story is more ambivalent and vulnerable. When our understanding of the same historical story changes over the course of our lives, can we really speak of unvarnished truth? Dening’s question challenges Sahlins’s epistemological self-confidence, but in doing so reaffirms their joint commitment to a humanistic and respectful account of Pacific peoples. Sahlins’s focus on ethnographic adequacy and the weakness of ethnocentric Western models makes him skeptical about the possibility of generalization. Consider this passage from his short textbook Tribesmen in which Sahlins expresses profound ambivalence about generalization: Different countries, different customs: no two tribes are the same in detail. Tribesmen, moreover, are like all people and any person: the more familiar with them one becomes the more difficult it is to recall one’s first general impressions. So what I am about to do – which is to formulate a generalized design of tribal culture – is plainly hazardous and perhaps futile. But such is the magic of the sociologist’s “ideal type” that, founded as it is on actual or pretended ignorance of the empirical diversity, inadequate as it is as a representation of complex realities, primitive as it may be as an intellectual procedure, it can yield remarkable insights into the particular case. (1968d: 14)



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Despite his suspicion of generalization, however, Sahlins conti­ nues to do it. As his description on the University of Chicago Anthropology Department website notes, “From time to time he drops … ethnographic particularities for high-flying cultural theory.” We can see this, for instance, in the encyclopedic syntheses he has produced over the course of his career, from Social Stratification in Polynesia to What Kinship Is – And Is Not. Although Sahlins insists that we focus on the particular, at times his work looks a great deal like Max Weber’s or Charles Tilly’s. Sahlins has distinguished between chiefly and big-man societies, performative and prescriptive societies, and generalized for instance and systemic and conjunctural agency. His writing is littered with generalized processural dynamics such as the structure of the conjuncture, transvaluation, and parochialization. In fact, he often invokes master abstractionist Gregory Bateson and his concept of schismogenesis. The closest thing to an encyclopedic synthesis we have in this collection is Jonathan Friedman’s contribution. In it, Friedman combines a critique of afterologies with a survey of European political culture to argue for a strongly realist position. On this account, structures are not heuristic constructs designed by the analyst, he claims, they are really there. Friedman thus takes issue with “postmodern” approaches that, he argues, claim that human beings are infinitely free to act. In contrast, he argues, action is culturally determined, culturally situated, and culturally interpreted. Friedman makes this claim by comparing two assassinations committed by people at opposite ends of the political spectrum. By examining changes in the political fields of European countries in the past forty years, Friedman shows how the assassins actually shared political positioning. Ethnic and political conflicts that result from change in contemporary Europe, he argues, can be understood in terms of the ongoing transformation of a political culture in which diaspora and hybridity are not a sign of a lack of structure and a postmodern freedom, but rather of the enduring cultural determination of human action. Here Friedman’s pan-European view (which even touches on the US political scene) comes to resemble Sahlins’s discussion of interculturality in the transformation of basic political structures; however, where Sahlins traces variations in the theme of strangerkingship, Friedman traces changes in “Occidentalism,” or how the right and the left come to see the European cultural project itself.

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Sahlins’s “high-flying theory” does not only take the form of ideal-typical typologizing. One structure of Sahlins’s longue durée is his insistence on the logical rigour of his theories. Throughout his career Sahlins has insisted culture is “the ontological basis of the discipline: our object was culture and our study was cultures: their natures as discovered ethnographically, comparatively and historically” (2009a). Although few have noticed, Sahlins has undertaken a truly four-field anthropology to produce a logically coherent account of culture. Although a cultural anthropologist, he has not shirked from examining the biological nature of human beings, whether it be their similarities to primates (1958), or the physiology of their perception of colour (1976a), or the evolutionary origins of intersubjectivity (2011c). True, he has redrawn the arrows between culture, individuals, and the environment over the course of his career. But this is a sign of constancy not fickleness: he has consistently interrogated the adequacy of the ideas he has inherited and abandoned inconsistent positions. When these ideas have not been logically adequate he has altered them, as for instance when he forged a logically consistent account of sui generis culture out of White’s paradoxical commitment to the autonomy of culture and the determining power of the environment. This more purely theoretical turn can be seen in the contributions by Webb Keane and Joel Robbins. In his chapter, Keane rethinks the categories of “material” and “meaning” altogether. Popular accounts of Sahlins’s switch from “materialism” to “idealism” take for granted the idea that these two realms are distinct and incompatible – and that culture must be shaped by one or the other. In reality, Sahlins did not switch allegiance from the “material” to the “ideal.” Rather, he sought to move beyond a world view in which they were opposed. Keane develops this position by engaging with archaeology. Taking as his project the famous – and enigmatic – archaeological site at Çatalhöyük, Keane’s goal is to create a “materialist semiotic” to make sense of a neolithic material culture for which we have no historical scaffolding. Keane takes issue with archaeology’s tendency to divide the world into physical, utilitarian, and deterministic phenomena, on the one hand, and symbolic, immaterial, and free-willed, on the other. Keane demonstrates that opposing the material to the symbolic fails to illuminate ethnographic materials. Rather, we must reunderstand material culture as meaningful culture. Finally, Joel Robbins’s essay presents the most sustained engagement with Sahlins’s work. In his close reading of Sahlins’s account



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of culture change, Robbins argues against contemporary disenchantment with “strong” accounts of culture such as Sahlins’s. People may make “discontinuity a project” and actively seek to change their culture, and indeed cultural structures may not perdure for long periods of time. Nevertheless, Robbins argues, none of these facts successfully indicts an account of the causal force of culture in culture change. Robbins thus offers at a theoretical level what the other contributors have offered ethnographically: a defence of a rich, humanistic anthropology. This, then, is Marshall Sahlins’s practice of anthropology – a rigorous, humanistic study of cultural forms that is dedicated to the specific, but also cautiously generalizes: an anthropology that has undergone transformations while retaining its basic shape, is rooted in a four-field tradition, reaches out to a broader audience, and is morally engaged. We expect more writing from Marshall Sahlins in the future, and we believe that the essays here demonstrate that his practice of anthropology will continue in the work of his colleagues, maintaining continuity even as it transforms over time. As Sahlins’s inversion of the old saying goes: Plus la même chose, plus ça change.

Notes 1 In addition to the works cited in this introduction, the authors have drawn on a CV provided by Marshall Sahlins, as well as their own conversations with him over the years, to supply the dates and personal details mentioned here. We thank Marshall Sahlins for reading a version of this manuscript and suggesting changes and corrections. We were, unfortunately, unable to add all of the “original lines” he sent us for inclusion in this essay. All errors and omissions are our own.

1 How Long Is a Longue Durée? Structure, Duration, and the Cultural Analysis of Cultural Change Joel Robbins The drawing together of history and anthropology has been one of the major stories in the development of anthropological thought over the last forty years. It is a story in which Marshall Sahlins has played a central role, and the making of a marriage between these two disciplines has clearly been close to his heart: the words “history” or “historical” have appeared in the titles of five of his books since 1981. To the conjunction of history and anthropology he has done so much to effect, Sahlins has brought a robust notion of cultural structures, and he has shown how such structures give distinctive histories their shape even as in doing so they sometimes open themselves up to the impress of individual designs or empirical situations that exceed their own terms, thereby finding themselves transformed in the course of the very processes that reproduce them. The most general of the structures Sahlins treats as factors in historical process are those that from the point of view of the cultures to which they give form can be understood as structures of the longue durée – cosmologies, systems of kinship and alliance, folk notions of human nature, and the like. They are the enduring conceptions of the world and its workings that make a culture, and by extension its history, unique. Sahlins’s account of how such structures lend order to history have been influential not only in anthropology, but in history as well. Taking as given the importance of Sahlins’s contributions to the dialogue between anthropology and history, this essay asks how we might read his work differently if we were to regard him not only as



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someone who has enriched our conception of history, but also as the foremost contemporary anthropological theorist of cultural change. At first glance, this move from reading Sahlins’s work under the sign of history to reading it under the sign of cultural change might not appear to be a big enough shift in perspective to be meaningful. After all, history as a discipline is marked by an almost obsessive interest in change (Bennett 1997, Patterson 2004). As Gerschenkron (1968: 12) puts it, “the historian – at the peril of losing his subject – must be interested in historical change, that is to say, in the rates of change that lie between zero and infinity.” Following him, we might say that for historians stability is just a zero degree of change, where change is taken as the normal state of affairs. For cultural anthropologists, I have suggested elsewhere, it is generally possible to reverse Gerschenkron’s observation – at the peril of losing their object, they must be interested in cultural continuity, that is to say, in rates of continuity that lie between zero and infinity (Robbins 2007). Four decades of cross-fertilization between anthropology and history, and various popular critiques of the culture concept during the same period, have somewhat muddied this picture. But it probably still remains valid to say that for most anthropologists, whether they articulate this as a principle or not, cultural change is a zero degree of cultural reproduction, where continuity is taken as the normal state of affairs. It is this long-standing alignment of history with change and anthropology with continuity that makes the shift from reading Sahlins as a theorist of anthropological history to reading him as a theorist of cultural change seem too slight to produce interesting results: if history is about change, then anthropological theorizations of historical process will by their very nature be theorizations of cultural change as well. Yet in spite of the fact that it might appear to be just a slight shuffle of the feet, I want to argue that making this shift in perspective can open up different questions for our reading of Sahlins and provide for them new answers. Furthermore, the shift is worth making if for no other reason than that the battle to interest anthropologists in history has already been won, while that is not true of the battle to interest them in developing explicit models of cultural change. Most anthropologists today see the value in taking an historical approach to at least some of the questions they ask of their material, and there exists no theoretical camp that resolutely opposes this view. By contrast, few anthropologists have shown much interest in developing theories of cultural change. To be sure, they have rushed to study

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phenomena like globalization, modernization, and development that presume that cultural change is possible, and they have developed a number of descriptive categories in which to place changed cultures (e.g., hybrid, syncretic, and creolized), but their concern with such matters has not been matched by a sustained effort to theorize the various ways cultures come to fit these categories by undergoing processes of change. It is against this background that Sahlins has to be understood as someone who has made a number of major contributions to the study of cultural change. In the most general terms, we can say that what makes Sahlins distinctive among those who theorize change in any discipline is that he has wanted to maintain a strong theory of culture – a theory in which culture guides perception and profoundly if not exhaustively shapes action – even as he insists that such a theory must be able to account for the reality of change. In this respect, he can be characterized, as Sewell (2005: 199) has it, “as a structuralist of the Lévi-Straussian school who is trying to create a theory of cultural change without abandoning his structuralism.” Or, as Sahlins (1981a: 6) himself has put it, he has wanted to show that “the sacrifices apparently attending structural analysis – history, event, action, the world – are not truly required.” In working to square the structuralist circle of cultural reproduction so that it can allow for change, Sahlins has focused on developing new conceptualizations of practice and of the event. The major strain of his theory of practice is so well known as to require little discussion here. In his model, actors risk the cultural categories that shape their perception of the world by putting them to use in structures of the conjuncture that are always in principle capable of exceeding the expectations of those categories and thereby modifying them (see Sahlins 1985a). A less-known strain, which he argues for most extensively in Apologies to Thucydides (2004a), points to the necessity of delineating the kinds of structural situations in which people are culturally authorized to institute change through their practice – situations in which change is not wholly contingent, but is rather the structurally expected or prepared bringing to bear of personal and situational contingencies on the course of a culture’s movement through time (Sahlins 2004). In Sahlins’s terms, when practice does result in cultural change either because the world does not fit the cultural categories actors



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bring to bear on it or because structures have aligned in such a way as to open themselves to change, the actions by which change occurs constitute an event. This is tautologically true, as events are defined in terms of change: they are “a subclass” of human actions, “consisting of those … that change the order of things [i.e., structures]” (Sahlins 1991b: 46). Given this, one of the greatest tasks that has confronted Sahlins in his attempt to maintain a strong theory of culture while also theorizing cultural change has been the need to find a way of accounting for events that allows them to be in important (though not all) respects an expression of the very structures they transform. This is where his theory of practice, and particularly his notion of the structure of the conjuncture, comes to bear most strongly on his theory of change. For it is in the structure of the conjuncture that cultural structures, by means of human practice that is guided by them, reach down into the world to shape events while at the same time those events reach up into the structures that helped produce them and tinker with their organization. Although Sahlins’s understanding of the relationship between structure and event provides the basis for a novel conceptualization of cultural change, it is also the case that the opposition between these two terms has long defined the relationship between history and anthropology (Sahlins 1991b, Sewell 2005). By drawing us back to that relationship, discussions that unfold in terms of the opposition structure and event are likely to divert our attention from issues of cultural change per se, and fix it rather on that set of concerns that is proper to working out the relationship between those two disciplines, for example, issues of contingency, of the importance (or lack thereof) of the individual, and, as I will argue in a moment, of the event itself. In what follows, I want to replace the structure/ event binary with a slightly different one composed of the terms continuity and discontinuity. My hope is that this opposition will focus our attention more squarely on questions of how cultures change. In what follows, I take both continuity and discontinuity to apply to cultural structures, and neither of them presupposes a notion of the event at all. This is useful in that it prevents us from assuming that all change is “eventful” – that is, that it happens as the result of a discrete, time-bound set of actions. It helps us avoid the view that, as Sahlins (1991b: 78) puts it, change only happens as a result of “a brief present” that becomes “the resolution of a long past.” Instead

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of defining change by the events that cause it, I want to define it simply as cultural discontinuity – and to see what kinds of new avenues of exploration this redefinition might open up. Once the conceptual move from event to discontinuity is made, one returns unavoidably, and perhaps even more troublesomely, to the problem of how to hold on to a strong model of culture and still talk about change. For if cultural structures are subject to discontinuity, does it make sense to talk about them as cultural structures in the first place? On the assumption that culture is defined by continuity – it is traditional, inherited, and enduring – contemporary anthropologists who cannot turn away from the reality of cultural change in the world they confront are wont to drop the notion of culture altogether, adopting a nominalist attitude and defining all of life as a flux of constant change. The moment a culture changes, such arguments go, it ceases to be a culture and so culture cannot shape cultural change. Instead, we have to accept that the notion of culture is at best an analyst’s construction, and at worst a reification created by actors struggling to reach their own goals. Beyond this dismissive argument, even those who are willing to hold onto a strong notion of culture tend to imagine that, since cultures are oriented toward their own reproduction, cultural change must be caused by something other than culture. Hence, in arguments about cultural change, culture cannot have a central role to play. To counter these kinds of abandonment of the culture concept in the face of change, my first task will be to return to the same structuralist tradition that has nurtured Sahlins to argue that continuity in time is not a necessary feature of a cultural order. It is perfectly possible for humans to inhabit meaningful cultural orders that do not last very long, and that are no less meaningful orders for all that. Once this is done, I go on to consider models of transformation that treat culture as a primary force in steering processes of cultural change.

Synchrony Revisited Structuralism in anthropology has both drawn support from the discipline’s long-standing investment in seeing culture as enduring and lent theoretical sophistication to the way this investment came to be understood in the later part of the twentieth century. But in developing a structuralist theory of discontinuity, one has to question whether or not structuralist theory actually presupposes cultural



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continuity in its foundations or if it is only by accident, as it were, it came to be associated with a kind of continuity thinking that was in the air for other reasons at the time of its ascension. One interesting way to sort out this question on the side of the general cultural currents that left their mark on structuralism would be by way of a close reading of Triste Tropiques and other of Lévi-Strauss’s works in which he mourns the passing of cultural difference. But for the kind of argument I want to make here, it makes more sense to start on the side of the intellectual foundations of structuralist thought, querying the extent to which they define continuity as a necessary feature of meaningful orders. In this spirit, I turn to Saussure’s discussion of synchrony. In its imagery of time suppressed, this discussion would seem to argue for the long-lasting quality of linguistic structures. Yet despite Saussure’s use of this imagery and the spell it once cast over structural anthropology, it is possible to argue that Saussure did not make or even imply a link between the reality or importance of any given system of langue and its ability to endure through time. Saussure (1966: 80) begins his discussion of synchronic and diachronic linguistics by arguing that they need to be distinguished because “language is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms.” Because it is the relations that determine the values of elements, and not their own history nor the history of their relations, it is necessary to separate out the diachronic study of historical changes in elements of the system (and the systemic changes such elemental changes can cause) from the study of the synchronic relations that give elements their values at any given moment. This point is clear enough, but once it is made, Saussure’s argument quickly becomes confusing. In some places, Saussure seems to argue that a synchronic linguistic state is an analytic construction that the linguist posits for methodological reasons (Thibault 1997: 81; cf. Sewell 2005: 182). Such an argument can be inferred, for example, from the claim that one needs to take a synchronic approach to language because “the multiplicity of signs [in any language] … makes it absolutely impossible to study simultaneously relations in time and relations within the system” (Saussure 1966: 81). At other points, however, Saussure suggests that languages only effectively exist for users as synchronic systems, and that this is why it is important to study them synchronically: hence the key statement that “the synchronic viewpoint predominates, for it is the true and only reality to the community of speakers” (190) and the allied claim that “time does not exist

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insofar as the speaker is concerned. He is confronted with a state” (181). From the point of view of speakers, this second argument has it, it is diachrony that is an analytic notion – an intellectually motivated bringing together of elements that do not in reality condition one another’s value or shape people’s language use in the present. I bring up the coexistence of these two lines of argument in Saussure because accepting one or the other leads to very different understandings of the importance of synchrony to structural analysis. If synchrony is an analytic fiction, if as Saussure (1966: 81) somewhat unfortunately puts it, using the imagery I mentioned above, analysts get to synchrony only by “completely suppressing the past,” then the charge that structuralists routinely do analytic violence to languages and cultural worlds that in reality are in constant motion is difficult to refute. But if, on the other hand, human beings construe the world in terms of synchronic systems of linguistic and cultural categories – if history is something those who study living human beings produce only by expanding on the reality in which those beings live, rather than by observing an existing phenomenon – then there is no act of violence for which they have to answer when they carry out a synchronic analysis. Analysts have, on this understanding, no choice but to analyze languages and cultures synchronically if they want to know how languages and cultures work for those who use them. Having drawn from Saussure this argument for the reality of synchrony, I want to go one step further and notice an issue that he does not take up as relevant to his model of the speaker confronting the synchronic system. Nowhere does Saussure focus sustained attention on the question of how long a particular synchronic system has to endure in order to make meaning. Saussure’s discussion of the mechanics of language is free of any but passing references to enduring traditions, “Indigenous” inheritances, etc. Not only does his fledgling science not seem to need such notions (unlike an anthropology that would found itself on studying the “authentic” cultures of others), but the very reality of synchrony as a key feature of effective semiotic systems renders them irrelevant.1 We might add to Saussure’s claim about speakers confronting a synchronic system the notion that a speaker’s recipients must share the system to make much of what is said, and so a system needs to last at least long enough for the speaking “circuit” to run its course (Saussure 1966: 10–11), and we can also take on board his observation that given the length of time it takes individuals to learn a language, wholesale



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changes of an instantaneous nature would be impossible (72). But even with these assumptions about continuity in place, it is clear that in Saussure’s model of semiotic orders, a given language or cultural order does not have to last very long in its specifics to be able to carry out its function of allowing people to live meaningfully in the world. And I would further argue that none of the structuralists who followed Saussure have made a principled or explicit argument that counters this point. In laying out what I take to be Saussure’s argument for the reality of synchrony, my goal has been to reach a point where it is possible to suggest that the existence of discontinuities in culture should not lead us to question the value of cultural analysis – cultures can change from one synchronic moment to the next without ceasing to function as cultures for those who live with them for those moments. Culler (2007: 9–10) captures well what I am trying to establish: The term formalism has become something of a pejorative epithet in our era of historicisms, but formalism does not involve a denial of history, as is sometimes claimed. What it rejects is historical interpretation that makes the work a symptom, whose causes are to be found in historical reality. The Saussurian model can clarify this issue: it is precisely because language is historical through and through, always changing, that the distinction between synchronic and diachronic analysis is necessary, that we must relate any linguistic event to the synchronic system from which it emerges. If language were not so radically historical, we would have less need of the distinction. But what might appear to be a particular form or even sign is not the same in two different stages of the language, because what it is depends on what surrounds it. Although it is possible to read this passage as an assertion of the methodological importance of synchronic analysis, it is clear that by the end it is in keeping with my argument that in the structuralist sense synchrony is an ontological characteristic of meaningful orders. As analysts, we lose touch with the real existence of synchronic systems in human lives at our peril; indeed, Culler suggests, at the peril of our ability to understand history and change correctly. We are compromised in those efforts by failing to understand the ways such synchronic systems are always in force when people act, even if those actions lead to change.

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I hope to have come out of this discussion of synchrony with two claims firmly in place. The first is that cultural structures do not need to last for a long time in order to powerfully shape the way people live in the world. They can and perhaps often do last a long time, but cultural analysis is equally appropriate even in situations in which they do not. People who act effectively in the world at any level always act on the basis of a cultural system that is in place at least for the length of the moment in which they act, and to understand their action meaningfully it is that system we need discover. The second claim, a corollary of the first, is that cultural structures shape even those actions by which people intentionally or otherwise change the world and that, given this, to understand cultural change we need to understand the cultural structures that shape the actions that produce it. Once these two claims are made, the question then becomes that of how we can develop models of change as discontinuity in a way that gives cultural structures understood in the strong, synchronic sense, their full due as causes of such transformation. This is the question that guides the rest of this essay. One way to put what I am after in the development of models of change that are built around strong conceptions of culture is to say that I am looking for models of change that do not assume that people are ever outside of culture during processes of cultural transformation. Even theorists of change who are sympathetic to strong notions of culture often assume that change must in one way or another have extra-cultural causes. Sewell (2005), for example, provides a spirited defence of the value of synchronic analysis for those who want to study change: Unless we can represent to ourselves and our readers the form of life in one historical moment or era, unless we can describe systematically the interlocking meanings and practices that give it a particular character, how are we to explain its transformation – or, for that matter, even to recognize when and how it has been transformed … No account of change will be judged deep, satisfying, rich, or persuasive unless it is based on a prior analysis of synchronic relations.” (184–5, original emphasis) Yet when it comes to explaining change, Sewell turns to the individual variability of human beings, who are bound to understand the elements of a common culture in different ways (2005: 192–3).



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Elsewhere, in his important discussion of the development of the idea of “revolution” as justified popular violence in the service of political change, Sewell again posits the importance of an acultural source of change – this time in the form of liminal moments produced by structural dislocations that render culture momentarily less effective in shaping perception and action and allow for individual and group creativity (250–1, 254). In each of these explanations, the move from one synchronic state to another is caused by some action that is not motivated by either the old or the new culture: the practical energy needed to effect cultural discontinuity has to be drawn, it seems, from some source other than either the old or new culture and their usual motivating schemes. It must, that is, be mined from individuals and the dynamics of their private understandings, or from the general experience of cultural breakdown and the possibilities of creativity such breakdown allows.2 I have chosen to consider Sewell as an example here because of his sophistication as a cultural theorist. Many others could be found who adhere to some version of a structure/breakdown/new structure model of change. And the list of those who count on individual variation to generate change in culture is virtually endless. But Sewell is a superb reader of Sahlins and other cultural anthropologists, and I generally find his work to be some of the most valuable produced on the topic of cultural change. Unlike many who think culture is a useless or very limited idea and focus on what they take to be the obvious force of some real beyond culture (e.g., human nature, laws of development, the power of pain and trauma in shaping human life) in explaining social processes, Sewell works diligently to keep a strong model of culture in play in his accounts of historical change. His difficulties in offering a fully cultural account of cultural change, then, serve not to point up his own weaknesses, but rather to indicate how hard it is to construct such an account. In the remainder of this essay, I want to argue that Marshall Sahlins has offered us tools for doing so, and to expand on what he has offered us in a number of ways.

On Cultural Causes of Cultural Change A fully cultural account of cultural change would be one in which the analyst is able to explain the occurrence of discontinuities in cultural content without recourse to arguments about discontinuities in cultural process. That is to say, one would explain changing cultural

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categories and values without having to argue that at some moment in the process of change people’s action stopped being guided in important respects by culture. Sahlins’s best-known theory of cultural change, in which people’s actions are shaped by their cultural categories, which are then subject to change when the world does not fit them, satisfies these conditions well, and I take it as a baseline understanding of culturally conditioned cultural change.3 In work that followed Islands of History, Sahlins proffered some new models of change as a cultural process. He developed the most important of these models in the course of addressing a difficulty with the baseline theory as he had elaborated it in Islands of History. This difficulty follows from the fact that in the Hawaiian case he discussed extensively in that book, the driving force for change was the arrival on the scene of people from elsewhere whose lives were guided by a different cultural order. It was the ensuing clash of people whose actions were framed by different cultures that rendered the world recalcitrant to Hawaiian cultural categories. Sahlins’s account along these lines succeeded in explaining Hawaiian cultural change in terms of cultural process, but it left many readers asking if such explanations would also hold in the absence of an outside stimulus as powerful as the one that threw the world to which Hawaiian actions referred out of synch with the categories by which they did so: how, readers were asking, would a culture change in the absence of something coming to it from the outside? In a paper that introduces the most important of his more recent models of change, Sahlins (1991b: 45) responds to such a question by tackling the issue of what he calls “endogenous” or “internally generated events.” In laying out the causes of such events, Sahlins places the idea of actors risking categories by applying them to the world somewhat in the background, and develops a set of new models for exploring the ways cultural processes can lead to cultural change. One such model understands cultural change as the outcome of the operation of complementary schismogenesis between groups of people who share a general cultural framework. Sahlins borrows the notion of complementary schismogenesis from Bateson, and defines it as a “competition by contradictions, in which each side organizes itself as the inverse of the other” (Sahlins 2004a: 69). In putting schismogenesis to work in explaining historical process, Sahlins sees it as leading groups that begin by sharing a cultural background to progressively differentiate themselves from one another in ways



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that lead to cultural change. His key examples of the outcome of this process are the differences in internal organization that held between the Fijian states of Rewa and Bau on the eve of the great war between them, and the contrasts that held between Athens and Sparta at the time of the Peloponnesian Wars (ibid.). This model of transformation borrows little from the idea that what causes change is a lack of fit between the categories people apply in action and the world to which they apply them. But it maintains an emphasis on the idea that people create change by acting on the basis of culturally shaped understandings of the world. In cases of complementary schismogenesis, it is the culturally shaped understandings people possess about themselves and others that leads them to modify their own culture in relation to a negative example. Hence, the changes people make in the course of this process are based on actions explicable in cultural terms. A second model that appears in Sahlins’s later work aims to uncover the structural conditions that allow particular situations and the actions of individuals who take part in them to affect major cultural changes. Sahlins (1991b, 2004a, 2005e) discusses the structural mechanisms at work in cases where such change is possible as ones in which situations, by means of a series of cultural “relays,” become aligned with standing complexes of cultural ideas – thus allowing the resolution of the situations to modify the complexes of ideas to which they are linked. The examples he offers to illustrate this dynamic include among others the chiefly politics surrounding the war between Bau and Rewa in Fiji and the structural conditions that for a season allowed Elián González and the members of his family to become a preoccupation in US political debate around the turn of the millennium. What these and his other examples have in common is that all of them involve cases in which, first, existing cultural tensions are in play. For example, tensions between the political and kinship orders in Fiji, particularly as they oppose sovereignty of the chief to his relative powerlessness in the face of his sister’s sons – a tension heightened just before the onset of the Bau-Rewa war by the growing power of Bau. Or, in the Elián González case, the tension that marks the sanctity of the family in US culture when considered alongside its ultimate subordination to the market and the state. A second commonality between these cases is that they are ones in which the cultural tensions in question find themselves exemplified in specific situations in which the public takes an active

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interest in their workings out through the actions of those most closely involved in them. The resulting interlocking of macrohistories and microhistories, as Sahlins (2005e) puts it, allows a culture to change in the course of events in which people act in important respects on the basis of categories the culture itself supplies. To this point, Sahlins’s discussion of changes brought about by macro-micro relays is one in which cultural change is explained in wholly cultural terms. Yet in a further turn of Sahlins’s argument, matters become more complicated in this regard. Instances in which broader cultural tensions gear into specific situations, Sahlins (1991b: 63) argues, can turn persons into “social-historical individuals,” able to “embody a larger social order” they are then authorized to transform. Although their position as social-historical individuals is culturally prepared (either “systemically” or “conjuncturally,” a contrast I will not elaborate here – see Sahlins 2004a: 155), the fact that they occupy it does not erase their individuality. Rather, it creates a context in which their individuality can be brought to bear on cultural process in an unusually direct way. Sahlins discusses this in a remarkable passage that is unusual in his oeuvre and deserves to be quoted at some length. In this passage, he writes in terms of structure and event, and uses a terminology developed to elucidate his model of the way structural relays produce cultural change. This terminology includes “instantiation” (in which cultural categories become represented by “particular persons, objects, and acts”), “denouement” (the incident in which the categories are put into relation in actions), and “totalization” (when the consequences of the event are reabsorbed by a culture that changes in order to accommodate them) (Sahlins 1991b: 81–2). With this background in place, here is the passage I want to focus on: What makes the event is a dynamics of the incident that alters the larger relations figuring there – that is, in the persons of the social-historical actors and their social-historical doings. And what makes the alterations of the larger relations is the fact that in this lower-order incident, all kinds of considerations apart from the larger forces these actors instantiate, other forces of which they may be unaware, motivate them. Other beings and objects, with their own projects or causes and their own modes of action, affect them. Thus the famous “contingencies” of the event, with the effect of an “aleatory transition from one



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structure to another” (Le Roy Ladurie 1979: 114). These other series, however, are not in themselves contingent. They are only so in relation to the object of historical study; in themselves, they may be quite systematic. Here is a place, then, for psychohistory. For if by instantiation the totality devolves upon the person, and in the denouement the destiny of the first is submitted to the activity of the second, then society is decided by biography and – Durkheim and White forgive us – culture by psychology. (83) This turn in Sahlins’s argument is a challenge to the way I have been reading him to this point. Rather than a claim that culture exhaustively accounts for cultural change, it gives individual idiosyncrasies a key explanatory role. Are we then thrown back on the kinds of acultural models of change that assume that between any two different states of a culture there must exist a moment when something other than culture guides action and hence brings about the differences between them? Although it is difficult to fully quell the suspicion that Sahlins has in fact returned us to that common kind of model here (I cannot, in any case, fully argue against this claim on my reading of the text), I want to dwell for a moment on aspects of his account that at least render it much more indebted to cultural explanation than many other accounts that give acultural factors a role to play in processes of cultural change. An efficient way to bring out the aspects of Sahlins’s model that I want to foreground is to contrast it with the two explanatory schemes I drew from Sewell’s work in the previous section. Both of those schemes laid the causes of change at the feet of individuals acting on extra-cultural impulses, either private interpretations of cultural materials or creative ideas they develop in situations in which cultural structures have broken down. The way Sahlins’s model differs from both of these is that it insists that individual idiosyncrasies only gain a foothold on cultural process in situations that have themselves been culturally prepared for them to do so. In his model, individuals are not routinely able to bring their private understandings or culturally non-standard motivations to bear on cultural change. They can act in terms of them, of course, but the well-understood mechanisms, Durkheimian and otherwise, by which deviant acts are either put out of play or are put in service of reproduction usually prevent them from ringing cultural changes. Yet even as people’s personal particularities usually do not for these reasons register on

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culture, it is also not the case that culture has to cease to function, has to experience some sort of general breakdown, for them to be able to do so. Instead, what has to happen is that cultural categories have to settle on specific situations that can be made to mirror their structure so explicitly, so self-consciously, that the actors involved are able to bring their private projects to bear not only on the attainment of their own goals, but on the modification of the categories in question. What is distinct about this model among others that give individuality a role in change is that culture never stops being in play – the role of culture is never passive. Culture may not be sufficient to produce change on its own, but culture is necessary, and it thoroughly structures the very contexts in which individual idiosyncrasies work upon it. Fijian culture never stopped operating throughout the history of the Bau-Rewa war, nor did US culture cease to structure the events around Elián González. Instead, culture continued to operate even through the period in which it changed. In this respect, Sahlins’s model of macro-micro relays, despite the place it affords individual idiosyncrasies in the course of cultural change, is not one that has to resort to the discontinuities in cultural process in order to explain discontinuities in cultural content. With this conclusion in mind, it perhaps makes sense to distinguish not between models of cultural change that explain it in cultural terms and those that explain it aculturally, but rather between those that assume that culture plays a role throughout processes of change, even as the role it plays may sometimes make room for acultural factors to contribute as well, and those that assume that culture must at some point stop operating to guide behaviour if cultural change is to occur. Sahlins’s account of the process of structural relays would be an example of the former type. Such accounts have the virtue of lending no support to those who want to diminish radically the role that culture plays in social life, even as they are not naive about the roles other factors can sometimes play as well.

Discontinuity as Cultural Project Before concluding, I want to elucidate two more cultural models of cultural change that can be constructed on the basis of Sahlins’s work, though they each represent modifications of his own positions. These two models are linked inasmuch as both of them, like



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the model of complementary schismogenesis, concern complexes of cultural ideas that themselves push for cultural change and render projects of fostering cultural discontinuity collective preoccupations in the societies in which they hold sway. The first model I want to consider in this connection is one that aims to account for the emergence of cultural complexes that promote the rejection of standing cultural ideas and their replacement with new ones. The question this model seeks to answer is, how do cultures become explicitly discontinuity producing?4 Sahlins has provided an answer to this question in some of his writings that are not well known by comparison with the bulk of his work. The answer he has given is that cultures become explicitly discontinuity oriented only when those who act in terms of them are humiliated by some outside force such as colonization or Christian missionization that teaches them “to hate what they already have, what they have always considered their well-being” in such a way that they come to “despise what they are, to hold their own existence in contempt – and want, then, to be someone else” (Sahlins 1992a: 24). It is the experience of such humiliation that leads people to self-consciously reject the (often unself-conscious) project of reproducing their culture, and to develop a culture organized around the value of producing a new way of being that is discontinuous with that of the past. I have written at length elsewhere about Sahlins’s model of humiliation as a factor in cultural change and the way it fits with his better-known work on the topic (Robbins 2005; see also the other contributions to Robbins and Wardlow 2005). Rather than review the details of that discussion here, I want only to lay out one modification of the humiliation model that is necessary if it is to be included in that class of models that explain cultural change in cultural terms, without positing breaks in cultural process. This modification has to do with how we construe people’s understanding of the humiliation that moves them to develop cultural valuations of radical change. There is no shortage of discourses in the world that can lead people to interpret their own lives in humiliating terms. Sahlins, we have seen, offers colonial discourses and Christian conversionist ones as key members of this class, and to these we also can add developmentalist schemes and the language of marginality and temporal “behindness” they so often carry with them. Furthermore, there is, we are often told, the humiliation produced by the simple

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demonstration effect of superior technology and overwhelming power, or, nowadays, of the glamorous lives that other people are seen to live on television and in movies. The fact that these discourses and images are often encountered by people living in situations of considerable threat, violence, or material and social insecurity only increases their ability to lead people to condemn their own ways of life. From the point of view of cultural analysis of cultural change, these popular explanations for the advent of humiliation in people’s lives leave out a crucial cultural step. In order for people to grasp their humiliation in terms of discourses and images that come to them from outside of their own cultural frames, as these explanations suggest that they do, they would already have had to embrace those discourses and images in the very terms those discourses and images lay down: that is, they would already have had to experience significant cultural change. To see oneself as a sinner, one already has to know important parts of Christian doctrine, and to see oneself as undeveloped one already has to have a coherent (even if not accurate) sense of the benefits development can bring. If this is the case, then humiliation can only come after cultural change has taken place, and therefore cannot explain it. If we are to preserve humiliation as a cultural cause of cultural change, then, we need to modify our account by arguing that people first understand their humiliation in standing (or “traditional”) cultural terms, and that it is this traditionally framed experience of humiliation that leads them to actively engage humiliating foreign discourses that both deepen their sense of dissatisfaction and provide ideational materials for cultural reconstructions designed to overcome it. A brief example might be useful to illustrate the process of change I am describing.5 The Urapmin of Papua New Guinea are a group of approximately 390 people living in the Western Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. They were first significantly contacted in the late 1940s, and Baptist missionaries were active in their region by the early 1960s. Yet the Urapmin were too remote and small a group to be of much interest to the Baptist mission, and thus they were never directly missionized by Westerners. In the mid-1960s, however, community and family leaders began of their own accord to send some of the children of the community to study with missionaries working among other groups in their region. Many of the young people sent to study with the mission converted and began to work for the mission as paid evangelists to more remote



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groups. During the period in which they did so, few of the older Urapmin who had stayed at home adopted the new religion, though they remained open to learning about it from these younger members of their community. This pattern held for a number of years, but in 1977 a charismatic revival movement swept through their region. It settled early in Urapmin, brought by some of the younger people who had picked it up at a regional Bible school they were attending. Upon its arrival, almost all members of the community felt themselves “kicked” by the Holy Spirit, an experience that convinced them both of God’s existence and of their own sinfulness. Within the course of the ensuing year, everyone in Urapmin converted to charismatic Christianity. As they did so, they worked together as a community to dismantle their traditional religion (tearing down its temples, discarding the ancestral bones that were its primary focus, and burning the magic objects that were crucial to private engagements with the cosmos as traditionally understood). Ever since the time of the revival, the Urapmin have also worked together to establish a new set of cultural understandings among themselves: understandings about everything from what human nature consists of, to how people should treat one another, to how the cosmos is organized. At the same time, they have laboured to eradicate every vestige of active engagement with or interpretation of the world in terms of their traditional religious ideas. They talk constantly in public about the need to stick to their new understandings and to be done with those of the past. Why did the Urapmin embark on such a rapid, self-directed course of cultural change? The answer has to do with the way changes in the cultures around them – especially in those whose members had closer contact with missionaries and colonial personnel – dislocated the Urapmin from the central position they had once occupied in a hierarchical regional ritual system that was one of the most prominent features of traditional life in the region. Premised on a division of ritual labour grounded in an unequal distribution of important ancestral bones and secret ritual knowledge, this ritual system united a large number of societies in a single religious complex. Within this complex, the Urapmin understood themselves to be paramount, or, at worst, to share paramountcy with one of their closest neighbours and allies. This understanding was a crucial feature of their sense of where they fit in the world. With the emergence of the colonial order, and the spread of mission stations that took off under its aegis, regional organization

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shifted its grounding. Groups with greater access to the government began to base their claims to regional importance on grounds other than religious ones, and many in those groups opted out of the regional system altogether by converting to Christianity. As these changes transpired, the Urapmin found themselves shifted out of the centre of their own world. No longer a major power in religious matters that concerned everyone, they were becoming a marginal group whose members had little to show for themselves in the revised hierarchies of value by which life was coming to be judged in their region. It was this shift that produced the humiliation that drove the Urapmin to seek change, and it was a humiliation they understood in traditional cultural terms that defined people’s worth by their role in regional relations and defined these relations primarily in religious terms. The fact that the humiliation the Urapmin felt was defined as religious/cosmological in substance helps explain why the Urapmin looked to Christianity as a way to address it, for Christianity offered them a new religious system, and one in which their physical location did not ensure their marginality (Robbins 2006). But what is crucial to recognize here is that their initial experience of humiliation was one that made sense to them in traditional terms; it was this humiliation that drove them to look for a new way of understanding the world and their place in it. My more general argument is that humiliation must often, if not always, work this way. One must originally find the motive for change in traditional cultural understandings, or else one would already be occupying a new culture. I can introduce the last of the cultural models of cultural change I want to consider in this essay by staying with the Urapmin example and pointing out that once the Urapmin had adopted Christianity for reasons we can describe as making sense in traditional cultural terms, their new religion offered them a fresh set of humiliations that put in place a cultural emphasis on eradicating the culture of the past. Defining traditional cosmological figures as demonic, and condemning the practices by which one approached them as sinful, Urapmin Christianity urged the faithful to work consistently to put the past behind them. But it did more than simply attack the explicit figures and rituals of traditional religion. It also defined as sinful traditional ethical ideas and ways of organizing social life. To the extent that the Urapmin hold on to traditional ways of construing and acting in the world in these respects – and they do hold onto to some of them because their new religion gives them no alternative way to



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organize society, a point I cannot do justice to here (see Robbins 2004) – all of them remain constantly in struggle to surpass their traditional culture, and in much of what individuals say and do they present themselves as working toward change. We might, then, describe the current Urapmin situation as one in which people’s original humiliation and adoption of Christianity as a new cultural framework from which to address it has made them all socio-historical individuals; each Urapmin person has taken on the transformation of Urapmin culture as a project to which he or she can and must make a contribution. The image of a collection of Christians who see themselves as socio-historical individuals licensed to change their culture undoubtedly sounds all too Protestant (cf. Errington and Gewertz 1995). But I would contend that such cultural formations, ones that demand change and define all members of society as historical actors capable of carrying it out, appear in many places today, not all of them marked by Protestantism. Deeb’s work (2006) among pious Shi’i Muslims living in the southern suburbs of Beirut offers a fine example coming out of a different tradition. The Muslims she studies are intent on “modernizing” their religion on their own terms, creating a culture that is different from those of both their own “near past” and “the contemporary ‘West’” (19). Through a self-conscious process Deeb (20–2) labels “authentication,” they aim to replace their traditional Islamic understandings and practices with “true” ones. Like the Urapmin, they constitute a community in which individuals feel they have both an ability and a responsibility to change their culture. Deeb’s rich ethnography of the lives of these Lebanese Muslims demonstrates across many domains of social life the way the cultural impulse toward change that marks their view of the world results in a situation in which people experience “a disruption in the way they practice, understand, and talk about Islam” (2006: 22). Moreover, she is able to document with precision the kinds of cultural changes they make, showing in detail how a culturally defined interest in cultural change can lead to concrete transformations. One of her finest examples of this process is her account of the changes pious Muslims have made to the series of rites known as Ashura. The Ashura rites commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, a crucial event in the definition of Shi’ism. Traditional Ashura ceremonies, which Deeb (2006, chapter 4) describes in detail, focus on arousing emotion and fostering the salvation of the participants in the future. Authenticated Ashura rites, by contrast, are carried

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out in orderly, less emotional fashion, and stress the importance of revolutionary activism and social welfare work in the present. These major modifications in the meanings of the rites are carried by numerous changes in their details: the authenticated rites do away, for example, with practices of self-laceration, change the way in which key recitations are made, and shift the representations of Imam Husayn’s sister, Zeynab, from ones that dwell on her grief to ones that highlight her leadership of Husayn’s community in captivity and her role in training them for resistance. Authenticated Ashura rites also feature much greater participation by women. Deeb’s ethnography provides far more details on the authentification process as it remakes not only Ashura rites but many other traditional ideas and practices among those pious Muslims who are committed to it. Her work can be taken as a paradigmatic example of an approach to culturally driven cultural change that proceeds by ratifying many or all members of a society to act as agents of change. With so many people in the world now self-consciously engaged with their own cultures – some by way of preservation, others by way of rejection – this kind of cultural formation is one that anthropologists are more and more called upon to understand. By recognizing it as one in which a specific dynamic of cultural change is in play, it should be possible to compare cases fruitfully across regions and more generally push forward a strong program of studying cultural change in cultural terms.

Conclusion During the same period in which anthropology and history drew closer together, strong models of culture as the most important force in shaping people’s perception of and action in the world began to fall out of favour in the anthropological community. The reasons for culture’s fall are numerous, but perhaps this essay has revealed the identity of one of the less often noticed of the many hands that pushed it down. This would be the way in which history’s traditional interest in discontinuity and change presented a challenge to anthropology’s similarly long-standing analysis of authentic cultures as enduring in relatively unchanging forms. As anthropologists turned to history, many found themselves wanting to recognize the importance of change in human life. To the extent that relying on strong notions of culture appeared to make it impossible to realize



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that goal, they were prepared to drop those notions and retreat to individualist models of social process, or universal accounts of worldhistorical development, or what Sahlins (1999c) has called “powerism” or power functionalism, or a host of less distinct schemes in which theoretical positions were not terribly well defined but arguments about culture (rather than the “cultural”) were without question out of bounds. In this conjuncture of theoretical ambitions and perceived constraints, the work of Marshall Sahlins stands out as unique. Refusing to abandon a strong model of culture as a condition of entry into the arena of change, he has made major innovations in how culture is understood. In this essay I have engaged this facet of his work, laying out some aspects of it, amending others, and attempting through my discussion of synchrony to provide an explicit argument for why it is possible to develop models of discontinuity in cultural content that do not depend on discontinuities in cultural process. My claim is not that culture controls the flow of change in its entirety in all cases. But I would like to think that it is in keeping with the overall outlines of Sahlins’s influential body of work to suggest that anthropologists ought at least to be willing to push culture as far as it can go in explaining all facets of human life. In the case of cultural change, that project has only really just begun. I have argued in this essay that there is thus great value in reading Sahlins’s approach to anthropological history as having given us key theoretical tools for exploring the crucial role that culture plays in shaping cultural change.

Notes 1 Chapter III of Part One of Saussure’s (1966) book Course in General Linguistics contains Saussure’s primary discussion of synchrony as a theoretical notion. The chapter that immediately proceeds it (Chapter II , Part One) does contain some statements about language being traditional and inherited from the past that may appear to contradict my claim that Saussure has no need for ideas about enduring traditions and the like (Saussure 1966: 71–8). But a careful reading of Chapter II will show that in it Saussure does not make any claims about how long a language must last to count as a language, and in fact he concludes his discussion with the argument that although impervious to change guided by individual intention,

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languages are always changing. These are the themes that he picks up from this chapter in the chapter on synchrony, and he never has recourse to an argument that the only authentic languages are long-standing ones. Sewell (2005: 193–4) also offers a perspectival model of internal social variability in which people with different social vantage points on a culture are bound to see it differently and these differences can lead to change. This has the makings of a more fully cultural account of change, but as such perspectivalism is wielded in contemporary anthropology and social thought more broadly, it often devolves into a kind of Western common sense individualism that in practice gives culture very little role to play in shaping social life (cf. Sahlins 2004: 186–7). I argue elsewhere that what I am calling here the baseline model is more complex than many readers have taken it to be, and I trace out a number of the facets of Sahlins’s work on change up through Islands of History (published in 1985) (Robbins 2004: 6–15). Here I focus on the models of change Sahlins developed after the appearance of that book. I use the cumbersome phrase “discontinuity producing” rather than, say, “self-transforming” to mark that the kind of changes these cultures define as valuable are those that make a radical break with what has come before. They can be distinguished from (though they are often also related to) modernist cultural formations that value change as an enhancement of existing features they already define as their strengths (e.g., technological advancement, individual freedom understood as autonomy, etc.). This account draws on Robbins (2004), in which the argument I present here is fleshed out in much greater detail.

2 Monarchical Visions: Constructions of “Kingship” in Colonial Samoa Jocelyn Linnekin On 18 August 1885 the Samoan high chief Malietoa Laupepa wrote a letter to Queen Victoria (Figure 2.1).1 Addressing her as “Tupu Tamaitai,” the “Lady King” of Great Britain and Ireland, Laupepa endeavoured to clarify Samoan political custom for her. He would have her know that, according to the customary beliefs of Samoa from the earliest times, he – Malietoa Laupepa – was the “real King” (Tupu) of Samoa. Laupepa’s letter to Victoria was but one of many appeals by would-be Samoan kings to foreign powers and powerful resident foreigners. During the protracted “kingship dispute” of the late nineteenth century, Samoan chiefly rivals fought one another with genealogies and mythic history as well as with armies of followers. The climax of this complicated saga was a bizarre courtroom battle in which an American judge had the task of determining who would be the king of Samoa. This chapter examines European and Samoan understandings and invocations of “kingship” during the decades immediately prior to formal colonial takeover, a period when chiefs warred over questions of customary precedence and the islands’ government seemed for a time to change hands on a daily basis. Foreign diplomats and entrepreneurs called the situation “chaos” and found the disorder intolerable. Thus, from the 1860s until the Western partition of the archipelago in 1900, an assortment of foreign settlers, consuls, and adventurers tried by direct and indirect means to institute a lasting, centralized indigenous government in Samoa.

Figure. 2.1.  Laupepa’s letter to Queen Victoria.



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From the anti-colonial perspective, the Samoan kingship dispute could be cited to illustrate the destructive effects of Western contact on native societies. Such an analysis might conclude that indigenous politics are irrelevant and ineffectual in the face of the structural imperative of core-state expansion. This interpretation would not do justice to Samoan political history. In contradistinction to older paradigms of unidirectional “impacts” on indigenous societies, Marshall Sahlins (1981a, 1985a, 1995) has problematized the contact encounter as a complex interaction between cultural systems that are foreign to one another. In the “structure of the conjuncture” a mutual interpretation takes place, each side sizing up and situating the other within a cultural value system. Creative symbolic revaluation is ongoing, reciprocal, and mutually influential. Samoan political conflicts of the late nineteenth century aptly illustrate how, in contact settings, foreigners and indigenous people symbolically construct their own and each other’s conceptual models, and deploy those novel constructions to achieve culturally specific goals. For a number of reasons, Samoa came into the Western orbit relatively late in comparison with other Polynesian island groups (see Gilson 1970; Hanson 1973; Holmes 1980; Linnekin 1991a, 1991b). The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of intensifying commercial interest and political meddling by citizens of the “Great Powers” – Great Britain, Germany, and the United States.2 With home governments leery of the risks and expense of far-flung territorial acquisitions, none of these three nations was eager to annex Samoa formally. Yet each wanted to protect its citizens and commercial interests, and – perhaps most importantly – each feared the consequences of allowing the archipelago to fall to one of the other powers. Strictly speaking, the colonial era in Samoa did not begin until partition in1900, when Western Samoa became a German colony and the eastern islands were allocated to the administration of the United States Navy. I apply the term “colonial” to the late nineteenth century because, although the archipelago was not yet under foreign rule, Western imperial priorities and aspirations disproportionately framed chiefly contestation. Most foreigners viewed the model of kingship as a culturally appropriate solution to the perceived problem of chronic political disorder. In the European view, a monarchy held the promise of stable, authoritarian rule. For elite Samoans, the kingship represented a possibility seldom realized in the past, but now more achievable because of the presence of settler

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factions with arms to sell and, sometimes, with military assistance to lend to one chief or another. During this period “kingship” was a contested narrative field for both Samoans and foreigners. It would be inaccurate to characterize the kingship as a foreign political model imposed on an unwilling or unwitting people, nor did the Samoan chiefs’ pursuit of kingly status indicate the adoption of Western modes of rule. Chiefly contenders embraced the goal of centralized rule as they played out long-standing family and district rivalries. Samoan chiefs knew that there was myth-historical precedent for a single ruler over a unified country, and they enlisted the European model to further their own political ambitions. Resultant incarnations of the kingship were chronically short-lived. Instead of putting an end to factional conflict and instituting the stable government that Europeans wanted, “kingship” sedimented a not entirely new direction in Samoan political striving. The quest for a Samoan king illustrates a mutually influential interaction between foreign and Native constructions and goals – a process whereby both European and Samoan scenarios for political rule in the islands were reoriented.

Of Chiefs and Kings During the early contact period in Polynesia, Westerners were preoccupied with the centring project – the creation of, and putative cultural precedent for, a stable unified polity ruled from an administrative centre by a head of state. Foreign visitors to Samoa frequently complained about “the want of power amongst those who are called chiefs” and made invidious comparisons with island societies such as Hawai‘i, where chiefs gave orders and could expect them to be obeyed, much to the convenience of foreign commercial interests.3 The limits of Samoan chiefly authority were perceived as a hindrance to spiritual conquest as well as to orderly trade. As early as 1835 Methodist missionary Peter Turner drew an explicit contrast with the mission’s success in Tonga when he reported to his superiors: “There are difficulties … of which we knew nothing in the Tonga group, viz. the want of a head to govern, a king … the common people do as they please, and it seems optional whether they do the commands of their chiefs or not.”4 Conversion strategies that had worked well in Tonga seemed, in Samoa, only to incite more community divisions. The tactic of “making presents” to ingratiate chiefs, for example, tended to backfire



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in Samoa. Where Tongans tended to be “satisfied” with a chief’s decision to redistribute or not, Turner noted, Samoans were likely to show their displeasure by aligning with another chief or by affiliating with the rival Protestant group, the London Missionary Society (LMS): “If he be a cheif [sic] – he will separate & build his own chapel for himself & his relatives. The same religion will perhaps have 3 chapels when the whole town does not contain two hundred persons.”5 Thirty years later, when Samoa was receiving much more foreign traffic, British Captain Hope gave an address “to the chiefs of Samoa,” critiquing what he saw as the most objectionable features of their society and instructing them on the political model they should emulate. Noting that Hawai‘i, Tonga, and Rarotonga had all established unified governments, the sea captain advised them: “You have got your islands divided into many different districts each of which is quite independent of others … It would be good for Samoa too if she had one head over the whole group, but if that cannot be there could at all events be one head over each island … But it would be far better to have one head who might have a council of Chiefs to advise him.”6 The Western powers’ ambitions were not uniformly imperialistic in the sense of seeking to acquire territories abroad. Government policy and settlers’ opinions regarding the future of Samoa often diverged on the issue of formal annexation, with officials at home maintaining that colonial interests could be served just as effectively, and with much less risk and expense, by means of laissez-faire economic relationships and informal consular influence on the government. For such aspirations to be realized, however, “a government” must be in place to ensure safe trade, protect private property, and make good on diplomatic promises. Europeans looked to their own political models for the form of the hoped-for indigenous government, and most saw monarchy as the logical choice for Samoa. The monarchical model would presumably satisfy foreign settlers’ demands for effective local control and, moreover, accorded with Western assessments of the native people’s developmental state and political maturity – or, more accurately to their mind, immaturity. The prevailing rationale was that peoples living so recently in a state of barbarism could not be expected to govern themselves democratically. Moreover, monarchy was thought to be “‘naturally’ suited to Polynesians” (Gilson 1970: 188). Westerners not only construed the hierarchy of the Samoan chiefly matai system as a precedent for kingship, but equated the two institutions

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as homologous political forms and readily categorized indigenous chiefs as “kings” (cf. Hocart 1927). “Kingship” implies a bundle of political ideas – the ruler as societal exemplar, a monopoly of force, centralized administration, and the prima facie existence of a “nation.”7 These notions seem ill-suited to Samoa, where political authority was dispersed territorially among the chiefs of villages and districts as well as functionally within the local polity.8 Formal authority in Samoa is associated with chiefly (matai) titles, and no single title in itself conveys authority within a polity larger than a district. The Samoan village council (fono) of chiefs has historically claimed decision-making autonomy in local affairs. Chiefly titles are associated with villages and carry the authority to administer and allocate lands belonging to extended families (‘āiga). Matai “titled persons, chiefs” are fundamentally linked to the local level through kin ties, for they are first and foremost the heads and chosen representatives of families (Mead 1930: 18; Meleiseā 1987: 7–8; Shore 1982: 71–2). The ‘āiga elects the successor to the family title on the basis of past service (tautua) and ability rather than by a fixed rule of inheritance. The matai’s dignity is associated with the title rather than with the individual from birth (Mead 1930: 122; Meleiseā 1987: 8). There is no ethnohistorical evidence that Samoan chiefs were physically or ritually set apart from their people, although some ethnographers were told that personal taboos surrounded certain “sacred” chiefs “in the earliest period” (Kramer 1942 [1902]: 17; cf. Mead 1930: 180–1). Despite the elaborate punctilios and oratorical obsequies paid to Samoan chiefs, the matai’s authority in most cases extended little beyond the family.9 Importantly, however, the highest titles have carried the potential for wider political reach since mythic times. Samoan political authority is further problematized by the functional and behavioural complementarity between two types of chiefs, ali‘i (high chiefs) and tulāfale (talking chiefs or orators). The distinction grounds a systemic tension in the distribution of power, in that “chiefs” are accorded greater ceremonial respect but “orators” have the political-economic edge. The high chief “is supposed never to injure his dignity by speaking for himself,” the British consul remarked in the 1880s (Churchward 1971: 25).10 It is the job of orators to speak for the chiefs in public meetings and officiate at ceremonial distributions, for which services they are customarily paid in cultural valuables – fine mats (‘ie toga) and tapa cloth



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(siapo). The norms of exchange give tulāfale the material advantage (Kramer 1942 [1902]: 51; Mead 1930: 77; Shore 1982: 245; Williams 1832 in Moyle 1984: 250); historically, the political import of the ceremonial goods meant that orators enjoyed considerable leverage over chiefs in such matters as the bestowal of high titles, marriages, and regional alliances (Linnekin 1991c). Perhaps most importantly for the present discussion, talking chiefs preside over, witness, and legitimate the bestowal of titles at every level. Although the ali‘i are higher in ceremonial rank, the orators have historically been the political operators and “kingmakers” of Samoa.11 The conflicts of the late nineteenth century revolved around a small number of high titles that were controlled by powerful groups of orators, principally Tumua, based in the A‘ana and Atua district capitals of Leulumoega and Lufilufi on Upolu, and Pule, identified with the principal villages of the island of Savai‘i. Both Samoans and foreigners recognized that certain eminent titles represented major regional and familial alignments and were thus significantly different from other, lesser matai titles in stature and political potential. Although the principle of family election pertained in theory, in reference to the high titles the notion of ‘āiga was so broadened that these statuses were effectively regional rather than the purview of a village-based extended family.12 While still identified territorially with particular villages, the high titles attracted the allegiance and material support of non-local chiefs, so that putative “family” affiliations “cut across territorial boundaries” (Gilson 1970: 52). Moreover, “family”’ could be invoked honorifically, retrospectively, or persuasively. That genealogies were reckoned bilaterally, and were considered esoteric and privileged knowledge, maximized the possibilities for such appeals. The discursive embrace of ‘ āiga “family” reflected putative genealogical relationship but did not guarantee allegiance. Intrafamilial rivalries, assertions of village autonomy, and precedence claims by particular orator groups translated into frequent defections and swings of support. Additionally, disputation is inherent in the matai system because the relative rank order of supra-local titles is ambiguous. Within the village council (fono), the order of presentation of the cup in the kava ceremony reflects and publicly proclaims the relative ranking of local chiefs. But since visitors are served first as a matter of courtesy, the ali‘i in a travelling party followed by their orators, the relative rank of particular chiefly hosts and guests remains an open

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question. That “high chiefs” are always served categorically before orators elides other crucial disparities, for many ali‘i titles are insignificant in their political stature and are far outweighed by the important orator titles in all contexts except ceremonial protocol. Westerners’ difficulty in identifying a Samoan “king” among the high chiefs was compounded by their own readiness to use terms such as “king,” “royal,” and “princes” for statuses that were in no way equivalent to the European concepts. The quest was further complicated by the nature and functions of Samoan political discourse, notably the esoteric chiefly language employed by orators at public gatherings. Samoan ceremonial speech is rich in metaphors, metonyms, mythical allusions, and synonyms for places, titles, and groups of chiefs. The meanings are culturally overdetermined and incomprehensible to an outsider, as well as to most non-chiefly Samoans. The chiefly vocabulary is used broadly, honorifically, and evocatively to show courtesy and to persuade in the public arena. The power of this language to mollify and persuade is enhanced by its imprecision in matters of relative rank. Ceremonial discourse leaves national-level questions of precedence unanswered precisely because such questions can provoke violence and, in the past, could spiral into regional warfare. Every matai in a leadership position commands the allegiance of a group of untitled males, whose cultural job is to guard family and village honour. The untitled men were and are expected to be somewhat hotheaded and quick to avenge any perceived slight.13 Westerners looked to the ceremonial vocabulary for words that might denote status levels in a fixed rank hierarchy, and particularly they sought an equivalent for the notion of “king.” One candidate was Tui, apparently a borrowed Tongan word, which the missionary Samuel Ella (1895) alternately defined as “synonymous with king” and as “lord or king.” The paramounts of Tonga and Fiji were known to the Samoans as the Tui Tonga and Tui Fiti, and Tui prefixes the titles of the highest chiefs of A‘ana, Atua, and Manu‘a. Ella explained that the Tui A‘ana and Tui Atua belonged, moreover, to the category of “sacred chiefs” (ali‘i pa‘ia), those who “possess special titles” and “to whom very great deference is shown” (2). There were and are several other collective designations for chiefs of the highest rank. The Methodist missionary George Brown14 cited “a higher class of chiefs who were called tama o le Malo – sons of the Malo or conquering party. These were addressed as kings.” Then there were usoali‘i



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or “royal family,” Brown reported, those from whom the successor to a high title would be chosen. Gilson (1970: 62) interprets the honorific term tama‘ āiga (sons of families) to denote contenders for paramount rule (cf. Tuimaleali‘ifano 2006). Ceremonial inclusion in any of these categories could be used to justify a claim to higher rank. There was more than one Tui, but there could only be one king. A consensus developed among foreigners and elite Samoans that the indigenous prototype of kingship was the Tafaifā, an ancient term denoting a chief who held the four paramount titles known collectively as pāpā (Tui A‘ana, Tui Atua, Gato‘aitele, and Tamasoali‘i). Tafaifā was a unique status that could only be held by one person at a time. The first Tafaifā was the woman culture-hero, Salamasina (Kramer 1958 [1923]). Her kin connections included the Tui A‘ana and the Tui Manu‘a as well as the Tui Tonga and Tui Fiti (ibid.). Salamasina is said to have ruled in about the sixteenth century on the Western time scale. “From then on,” Gilson (1970: 58–9) writes, “the holding of a single pāpā title was not the highest honour but, rather, a means of contending for the Tafaifā.” Salamasina is said to have received the four titles consensually, “by free gift from all the Tumua.”15 Thereafter the position of Tafaifā was frequently sought after but seldom achieved by chiefs of the prominent families Sā Tupuā and Sā Malietoā (the prefix Sā denotes “family of” and lengthens the final vowel of the name, which is both a chiefly title and a family surname). There was no “royal line” through which the position descended; the four titles still had to be acquired individually by conquest or by winning over the orator groups that conferred them. All of the principal contenders for the kingship were descendants of Salamasina. The extent to which Salamasina’s dominion constituted “rule” in the sense of command authority is unclear and unrecoverable, but there is no evidence of a redistributive network such as pertained in Hawai‘i’s more stratified chieftainship. Ethnohistorical accounts stress that the pāpā titles and the status of Tafaifā conferred ceremonial superiority and a right to a degree of “courtesy” rather than effective power.16 Infrequently achieved, the preEuropean Tafaifā seems to imply symbolic centralization rather than national integration. Europeans presumed that they could treat Samoan cultural traditions and genealogies as a body of evidence that, assembled and analyzed objectively, would reveal the true king of Samoa. They

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erred in two crucial assumptions, however. First, by conflating “chiefs” with “kings” in the European sense, they presumed the existence of a single linear rank order in which each high chief had a defined position. No such fixed hierarchy could be established for Samoa, however, in part because relative rank beyond the village was ambiguous. Second, foreigners failed to recognize the disjuncture between ceremonial rank and effective power in the Samoan chieftainship. The ritual respect due to a particular matai title had nothing to do with the outcomes of chiefly conflicts. Military success, not a title’s genealogical precedence, was the means of establishing supra-local rule. Though many titles could qualify as belonging “to the highest rank” on customary grounds, only a few chiefs could mobilize the practical support required to contend for the Tafaifā. The identification of ruling power (pule) with conquest is conveyed by the word Mālō, one gloss of which is “to win.” Samoans referred to the three imperial nations collectively as Mālō Tetele, the “great governments” or “great powers.”’ In the course of the nineteenth century Mālō came to mean the “government” capable of keeping itself in place. In the nineteenth century none of the four titles that made up the Tafaifā either conferred or coincided with effective paramount power, that is, military supremacy. Other titles and “families” had risen to prominence in recent history – notably Malietoa, Tupua, and Mata‘afa – producing chiefs who, though not considered to be of the highest rank, contended for the Tafaifā titles through warfare. The first Malietoa to acquire the four titles was the Savai‘i chief Vai‘inupō, who in 1830 welcomed LMS missionary John Williams (Moyle 1984). Although most Samoans and foreigners equated the kingship with the status of Tafaifā, the word most commonly used for “king” was Tupu. The relationship between the statuses of Tupu and Tafaifā and their associated modes of legitimation was central to the latenineteenth century kingship disputes. The varied referents and changing meaning of the word Tupu illustrate the dynamic quality of Samoan political concepts and their responsiveness to context. The explorer Wilkes (1845: vol. 2, 152), who visited Samoa in 1839, reported that Tupu referred to the “highest class” of chiefs; arguably, as suggested above, the same could be said of ao, pāpā, and ali‘i pa‘ia. Gilson (1970: 117) notes that Tupu o Salafai “Paramount Chief of Savai‘i” was “a dignity created and first assumed by Tamafaigā,” the notoriously cruel chief who was defeated by



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Malietoa Vai‘inupō just prior to the arrival of John Williams in 1830. Vai‘inupō’s brother and successor, Taimalelagi, also claimed to be Tupu o Salafai in the 1840s, but A‘ana and Atua districts refused to acknowledge his pretensions “further than as a matter of courtesy” (Stair, in Ella 1895: 8). Missionaries Ella (1895: 4) and Stair (in Ella 1895: 6) used Tupu, not Tafaifā, when describing possession of the four titles. Stair even claimed that the position of Tupu was superior to that of Tui. In the context of the matai system the position of Tupu was anomalous and inherently ambiguous. Historically recent, the Tupu was an after-the-fact status not associated with any particular title (hence not identified with any locality or district) nor conveyed by any Samoan modes of selection involving orator groups or families. In these two characteristics Tupu was similar to the Tafaifā. Was the Tafaifā – or the Tupu – a “king” in the European sense? Certain key ideas dominated colonial discourse about the Samoan kingship: concentrated military power, a political centre, laws, bureaucracy, a “royal line” of regular succession. Of these, only “the idea … of a centralized Samoa” (Meleiseā 1987: 2) was unequivocally embodied in the Tafaifā. Only in this sense was the Tafaifā an indigenous prototype of monarchy. For Westerners, however, “kingship” implied not only unitary rule, but a particular governmental structure with legalistic institutions supported by a monopoly of force.

Conjuncture In late nineteenth-century Samoa “Tupu” was simultaneously a position of power to be pursued by both precedented and novel means, an institutional hybrid, and a contested narrative field. The pursuit of the kingship sedimented a direction in regional and factional rivalries, which increasingly took the form of a competition to acquire the pāpā. Some chiefly contenders sought first to establish themselves as Tupu through foreign patronage, then to claim the pāpā titles by means that other factions with their own foreign supporters viewed as illegitimate. The positions of Tupu and Tafaifā were thus equated or separated opportunistically, according to the contender’s political interests and bases of support. Representatives of the colonial powers were both actors on the scene and an audience of potential arbiters to be courted and swayed. Arms sales and the offshore presence of military force presented new opportunities for

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gaining advantage, and Great Power recognition of a government constituted a new, non-customary form of political legitimation. Effectively, Tupu came to denote a paramount ruler installed and/ or sustained by settler factions and imperial military force. During the kingship dispute both Samoans and foreigners heatedly debated questions of custom in public arenas such as the expatriate newspapers. Westerners took different points of view on the arcane cultural complexities. Some ridiculed Samoan factionalism and elaborate public etiquette as the trivial preoccupations of a primitive people. With the deepening involvement of the imperial nations in Samoan affairs, however, the significance of chiefly politics could not be ignored. Missionaries and other resident experts interviewed Samoan chiefs on political questions and earnestly attempted to construct an authoritative version of the system, all in quest of a precedent for a stable government. At issue in these researches were categorizations of the high titles; the nature of the collective labels – whether formulaic or constituting a charter for primacy; the relationships between these groupings – whether discrete, overlapping, or synonymous; as well as the relative authority of particular districts and orator factions to confer the paramount titles. But the information obtained from Samoans inevitably reflected regional, familial, and factional interests, with different versions equally defensible on grounds of customary precedent and genealogical charter depending on the source’s point of view. In foreign discourse during this period the issue of the kingship was bound up with contending assessments of Samoans as a people. Many settlers responded with zest to the intellectual challenges of Samoan tradition and set out to master the details and nuances as if the chieftainship were a challenging puzzle that any civilized man ought to be able to solve. Some foreigners proudly claimed insider knowledge on the basis of their friendships with high chiefs, and they argued over mythic events and chiefly bequests in letters to the editor of the Samoa Times. Frustrated consuls, planters, and traders invoked the Samoans’ failure to unify as evidence of cultural backwardness and political incompetence (e.g., Samoa Times, 30 Mar. 1878, 2; Samoa Weekly Herald, 2 Sept. 1893, 2). As early as 1880 the British vice-consul pessimistically suggested that Samoa had no indigenous equivalent to kingship and, moreover, that a foreignsupported monarch “is not in the least likely to lead to the formation of a strong and independent native Government” (Maudsley



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1880: 94). Calling the 1890s monarchy a “burlesque,” American Consul-General Mulligan (1895: 745) wrote, “A King and peace are irreconcilable.” In rebuttal, contemporaries argued that foreigners were responsible for the very instability that they ostensibly aimed to remedy (Maudsley 1880: 92; Mulligan 1895: 743; Samoa Times, 16 Mar. 1889, 2). The English missionaries tended to take a sympathetic liberal view of the situation, blaming settlers and governments for the Samoans’ apparent inability to unite. “The fact is,” Ella wrote, “an established constitution existed from ancient times, but foreign Powers have ignored the native constitution and sought to establish a policy of their own construction” (1895: 1). Foreigners looked back with longing on Malietoa Vai‘inupō (Tavita), who was said to be the last “undisputed” Tafaifā.17 Vai‘inupō won a decisive military victory in 1830, the year that he met missionary John Williams and ostensibly converted to Christianity, and on these counts he appeared the most credible leader to Europeans during the first decade of intensive Western contact (Gilson 1970: 59–60; Henry 1979 [1958]: 134–42; Kramer 1942 [1902]: 27; Williams 1830 in Moyle 1984). He obtained the four titles over a course of years, and it is uncertain how long he held them before his death in 1841 (Gilson 1970: 88n64; Henry 1979 [1958]: 142; Kramer 1942 [1902]: 28). Malietoa’s dying bequest (mavaega) was that there should be no more Tafaifā; the titles were to be “scattered” among the districts. Malietoa named his brother Taimalelagi to inherit the titles Gato‘aitele, Tamasoali‘i, Malietoa, and the honorific “Tupu o Salafai,” while Tui A‘ana and Tui Atua went to chiefs of those districts (Gilson 1970: 117). Despite missionary counsels for peace and attempts to prohibit war by expelling combatants from church membership, the 1840s and 1850s were marked by chronic warfare. But these conflicts centred around issues of regional dominance – who was to be Mālō and who vaivai, the defeated or “the weak” – rather than pursuit of the Tafaifā titles as such. Although interdistrict disputes had implications for the bestowal of the pāpā, the kingship crystallized as the focus of conflict only in subsequent decades. Gilson (1970: 121) notes that the war of 1848–57 was the last “in which European intrigues played no substantial part and the first to be influenced by European arms.” Actions by American and British warships became more frequent in the 1850s, albeit in local incidents involving crimes against their citizens rather than in any

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national-level cause (see Gilson 1970: 152–6, 198–221). At the close of the war in 1857 Mata‘afa Fagamanu of the Tupua family was Tui Atua and the other three pāpā titles were held by a relative of Malietoa Vai‘inupō (Gilson 1970: 262). In 1860 a split arose within Sā Malietoā over succession to the title, which “for the sake of peace” was divided between the principal contenders, Talavou and Laupepa.18 In the late 1860s, motivated in part by foreign counsel and appeals such as Captain Hope’s (quoted above), the chiefly councils of the different districts began to address the issue of governmental integration. At the time, given the apparent dormancy of the Tafaifā, the model for a national government favoured by most Europeans was a confederation of districts. The question of the head of state inevitably provoked disunity. In Tuamasaga, the central district of Upolu, the formation of a government foundered on the factional dispute between the two Malietoas, both of whom were declared “king of the Tuamasaga” by their supporters. Laupepa’s parliament began to meet in Apia (the capital of Samoa today) rather than Malie, the old district capital and customary residence of the Malietoas, “owing to advancing commerce and the increase of European merchants and settlers.” Talavou’s party followed suit, establishing a rival government at Mulinu‘u Peninsula on the other side of Apia Bay, and became known as the “Unionists” after espousing the aim of national confederation. In its efforts to craft a “union” the Talavou camp sought both European legitimation and Samoan-style dominance in the status of Mālō. “One must allow,” Gilson remarks in reference to Talavou’s confederation, “for the Samoans having played on the uninformed hopes of Europeans” (1970: 265). The conflict between the two Malietoas was not at first a “kingship” dispute. Although foreigners used the term “king” to describe the heads of the competing governments in Apia, at stake initially was the paramount chieftainship of Tuamasaga. Europeans of the time typically referred to the high chief of a district, such as the Tui Atua, as a “king.” The issues of factional leadership and districtwide rule increasingly became conflated with the question of a national government, however, in Samoan political striving as well as in foreign conceptualization. The prevalence of the term “king” in contemporary European discourse points to the monarchical model’s prominence in the Western interpretive “vision” of Samoan political authority. The significance of the Malietoa dispute was amplified



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by the fact that Tuamasaga district included Apia, and despite the declaration of the town as a “neutral zone” foreigners were involved in the war as mediators, arms sellers, land grabbers, and occasionally as partisan targets. There were also national-level implications in the geographical dispersal of each contender’s adherents. Though Laupepa’s strongest support lay in Tuamasaga, and Talavou’s in the islands of Manono and Savai‘i, each had adherents in every district. What appeared to foreigners as a lack of consensus could be construed by either party, paradoxically, as a claim to national representativeness. Pursuing this strategy, some pro-Talavou chiefs of Atua and A‘ana came to Apia ostensibly “to mediate,” Turner reported, “but in reality wished to constitute a new government for the whole of Upolu, Manono and Savaii” (Turner, ms). Laupepa expelled the Unionist delegates from Apia in 1869 and became – briefly – the self-proclaimed “king” of an all-Samoa government (Whitmee 1870). Talavou prevailed militarily over the short term, and in an earlier time might have attained the status of Mālō. But Samoan political conflicts were now further complicated by foreign interference in various forms, from acts of callous exploitation, such as the arms sales and land grabbing of the early 1870s (see Gilson 1970: 271–90), to peacemaking attempts. Henceforth the presence of external military forces made it impossible for any faction to achieve a decisive victory and establish paramount rule by conquest – the Mālō. At the urging of resident foreigners, particularly the missionaries, the two Malietoas made peace in 1873, and Talavou withdrew to Savai‘i. In a significant event for the kingship quest, the chief who held three of the four pāpā titles died in 1870. Tuimaleali‘ifano Sualauvi – described by one missionary19 as “the king of Aana & Atua” – lacked only the Tui Atua title to be the Tafaifā, but he supported Laupepa and did not contend for the kingship. “Both war parties joined in paying him funeral honours,” the missionary reported. This example underscores the separation between ceremonial rank and political power and the discontinuity between Tafaifā and Tupu in Samoan conceptualization. The 1870s were a decade of governmental experimentation during which, for the most part, the “kingship” was an institutional office designed largely by Westerners and having little to do with the Tafaifā. Foreigners counselled the Samoans to establish a central government but at the time, and for the next quarter of a century, many anticipated that one of the Western powers would soon annex

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Figure 2.2.  Mata‘ata Iosefo.

the islands. In 1878 the editor of the Samoa Times (2 Mar., 2) noted with exasperation that “during the past four years we have had no less than five different forms of government, none of which appear to have given satisfaction to the various native factions.” In 1873 the Samoan chiefs formed a bicameral government at Mulinu‘u Peninsula; to avoid reviving the kingship controversy none of the principal contenders for the Tafaifā titles was included in the new government (Gilson 1970: 292), which lasted about fifteen months. “The natives were then tired of the republican form of government,” according to the jaded Samoa Times editor (30 Mar. 1878, 2), “and were desirous of making a kingdom of their country.” The Mulinu‘u government then devised a dual kingship, with the lower house of the legislature to select one king from Sā Malietoā and one from Sā Tupuā. The latter compromise seemed only to exacerbate factional antagonism, however, as Malietoa Laupepa was chosen over Talavou, and a chief



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named Pulepule was selected over Mata‘afa Iosefo (Figure 2.2), who appeared the strongest Tupua candidate. Mata‘afa’s supporters accused the LMS missionaries of lobbying against him because he was a Roman Catholic (Gilson 1970: 312). The dual kingship lasted only a few months. An American adventurer, “Colonel” A.B. Steinberger, had established an extraordinary degree of rapport with the Samoans, and in 1875 proposed a new constitution.20 Steinberger’s solution was an alternating kingship, with representatives of the Malietoa and Tupua families to take turns holding the office in four-year terms. The plan was acceptable to Samoans, Gilson (1970: 314) notes, because the new “king” was to be “merely a figure-head,” without the status of Mālō. Effective administrative power was given to Steinberger, whom the Samoans named as premier. But ten months after Malietoa Laupepa became the first “king” under the new constitution, Steinberger himself was deposed at the instigation of foreign settlers, backed by an American warship. Laupepa was pressured to sign Steinberger’s deportation order, and was then himself deposed by the Samoan legislature. The American naval captain unsuccessfully attempted to restore Laupepa by force, provoking a bloody clash in which several Samoans and sailors were killed. In the aftermath of the Steinberger affair Samoans were ever more internally divided.21 With both the Tafaifā and the constitutional kingship vacant the Laupepa/Talavou rivalry resurfaced, and factions formed around two contenders from the Tupua family, Tui Atua Mata‘afa and Tui A‘ana Tupua Tamasese: “Many of them say that the day that is appointed to make a new King is the day that war will commence in earnest in Samoa.”22 The Mulinu‘u parliament upheld the Steinberger constitution and remained in place, but it failed to perform the functions that foreigners expected of a central government.23 Laupepa set up a rival capital in A‘ana district but was defeated by the Mulinu‘u forces, which thus attained, in Samoan eyes, the status of Mālō. But the regime still came up short as a “government” in the estimation of Westerners and was vulnerable to foreign pressure, plotting, and Steinberger-style political entrepreneurship.24 In late 1878 Talavou’s party declared him “king” and took the place of the parliamentary regime in Mulinu‘u. One of Talavou’s strategies for establishing his government’s legitimacy was to proclaim laws and circulate them to the foreign consuls.25 He signed these as Malietoa, the “Tupu.”

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War broke out again in late 1879 between Talavou’s forces and the “old Government party.”26 By the terms of a peace agreement negotiated on board a German warship, Malietoa Talavou was appointed king (Tupu) for life and Laupepa made Regent (Sui Tupu, vice-king or king’s representative) to “attend to the work of the king” (Samoa Times, 10 Apr. 1880, 2). Amid shifting factional alignments another war erupted (Gilson 1970: 372–3). Talavou’s death changed the political scene, however, and the Tupua chiefs emerged as Laupepa’s principal rivals in contention for the kingship. In 1881 Laupepa was again proclaimed king through a peace settlement negotiated, this time, on an American ship. The agreement revived Steinberger’s idea of an alternating Malietoa/Tupua kingship; Tamasese was named regent and was to succeed Laupepa after a term later set at seven years. Laupepa’s credentials for the kingship were debated in the expatriate newspaper Samoa Times. A pro-Laupepa writer (30 Apr. 1881, 2) cited as supporting evidence the perpetual bequest of “the chief rule” by a Malietoa ancestor. Another correspondent countered (14 May 1881, 2): “there is only one of the whole line of Malietoas who can be said to be a King, and that was Tavita [Vai‘inupō] … Malietoa is the family name of a chief, of a second grade … [inferior to] the princes or higher chiefs of the Group called the Alo alii. Laupepa is a true Malietoa by descent, but has no claim to a King through the name.” Vai‘inupō, according to this writer, was the adopted son of one Pea Tavini of Manono, on whom the districts of Upolu bestowed the four high titles, “yea, the Kingship … In Samoan custom a chief holding these titles is a King, or highest divinity.” A third correspondent (17 May 1881, 2) criticized all parties for discussing chiefly genealogies in print: “The consequences of doing so among the Samoans themselves have often been terribly severe.” Nevertheless, he offered his own conclusion on the matter: that Malietoa was neither a second-rank title nor subservient to another group of chiefs. The writer also challenged the others’ interpretations of chiefly terms of address as indicating relative status, and asserted the priority of the category Tama‘ āiga: “There are but two chiefs to whom this title properly belongs … Malietoa and Mataafa.” Though initially supported by the Western powers, the Malietoa government had little effective power over either Samoans or foreign settlers. What authority it did have was steadily undermined by foreign intriguing, notably on the part of German officials



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and the major German trading firm in the islands, the Deutsche Handels- und Plantagen Gesellschaft der Südseeinseln zu Hamburg (DHPG).27 The company had long taken advantage of the conflicts by aggressively acquiring land in exchange for arms and ammunition, and it now waged a campaign to subjugate or dislodge the Malietoa regime. Under pressure from the firm’s manager and the German consul, who were supported by warships, Malietoa yielded legal authority to German officials. The government’s opponents were encouraged to break with his regime, and in January 1885 the Tumua orator group issued a statement that they were through with Malietoa and were supporting Tupua Tamasese; Mata‘afa was one of the signers.28 In another declaration addressed to “all men” (tagata uma), the Tumua chiefs blamed Malietoa’s “stupidity” for causing the trouble between Samoa and Germany, and asserted that “foreigners have no right to rule Samoa; this authority still rests with Tumua.”29 Tamasese established a rival government in Leulumoega, the principal village of A‘ana district, and began sending out letters headed “the capital [laumua] of Samoa” and signed by himself as “Tupua the king [Tupu] of Samoa.” Both sides in the “A‘ana rebellion” invoked customary precedent in public appeals to the foreign audience. From Leulumoega the chiefs of Tamasese’s legislature wrote to the British consul to inform him of “the belief that is customary in our country.”30 “Malietoa is not the name of the King of Samoa. It is only the name of a chief of one town. It is a new thing to call Malietoa the King of Samoa.” The pāpā titles, they continued, are the “true designation of the King of all Samoa” and “it is Tumua that have the authority over them.” The chiefs also claimed that Malietoa had little support among Samoans, and was only in power because of Great Power meddling.31 Learning of this missive, Malietoa Laupepa wrote directly to Queen Victoria to explain “the customs of our country beginning from ancient times” in his own favour: Malietoa is indeed the name of the King of Samoa. It has been taught in all parts of Samoa from former times … Malietoa has the true authority over the Papa because Tui Atua and Tui A‘ana were true sons of Malietoa. Likewise Tamasoali‘i and Gato‘aitele … became high titles by the command of Malietoa Uitualagi on account of their kindness to his son Malietoa La‘auli … only a chief of Sa Malietoa can give any of these titles.32

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Malietoa asserted, moreover, that it was a “new idea” for Tumua to claim collective authority over Tui Atua and Tui A‘ana, for these titles were created by a Tuamasaga chief in conjunction with Malietoa. Therefore Malietoa rightfully controlled “all of the papa.” Malietoa and the legislature were ousted from Mulinu‘u – evicted by the DHPG – and set up a government in exile in Tuamasaga. Tamasese’s short-term success was immediately attributable to the presence of German warships, but questions of customary legitimation continued to concern foreign observers as well as the Samoan protagonists. Depending on the cause to be served, partisan discourse asserted the priority and the fixity of formal rank relations, or the principle of conquest and the right of the Mālō. The missionary Newell jotted in his diary: “The Malietoa acquired by conquest the Tafaifa … Malietoa is not Tupu but Tupua is the Tupu by hereditary descent.”33 In his notes Newell differentiated rule by conquest from “the real pule” – pule meaning authority – which was legitimated by reference to genealogies and myth-historical political relationships. As illustrated by Malietoa’s letter to Queen Victoria, however, such precedents were eminently contestable. In 1887 the German consul and the DHPG manager sent a company employee and ex-military officer named Eugen Brandeis to assume the position of premier under Tamasese. For a year and a half Brandeis effectively ran the government, using German military backing to institute what Gilson (1970: 393) has called a “reign of terror.” Malietoa surrendered to Brandeis and the German consul and was exiled from the islands. Arguably the regime’s most tyrannical acts involved the collection of taxes, which the Samoans raised by mortgaging their lands and their copra to the German company (Linnekin 1991c). With the government’s support, the DHPG firm was able to contract agreements that prevented the Samoans from trading with other companies.34 During the Brandeis-Tamasese regime, for the first time in post-contact Samoa, one Western power exercised a monopoly of force in the archipelago and used it to compel Samoans to obey the laws of a national government. The degree of force required to accomplish this, however, appeared egregious to the other Western powers and led to a revolt by the Samoan factions that had once supported Tamasese. For Samoans, the critical provocation was Tamasese’s appropriation of the pāpā. Holding only the Tui A‘ana title but encouraged by Brandeis to claim the others, Tamasese began to sign his proclamations “Tuiaana Tuiatua Tamasese o le Tupu,” “Tamasese the King” (emphasis added).



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Atua district was so outraged by this pretension that German naval intervention was required and a number of chiefs were imprisoned (Gilson 1970: 394). Support grew for Tui Atua Mata‘afa, who was appointed both Malietoa and Tupu by the orator groups Tumua and Pule.35 Once again there were two competing “national” governments issuing correspondence from the “capital of Samoa.” Tumua and Pule claimed to express the will of “all Samoa” and styled themselves “Rulers of Samoa” (Samoa Times, 29 Sep. 1888, 1). The Brandeis-Tamasese government was driven from Mulinu‘u in October 1888 and set up their “capital” in an inland village. This conflict nearly brought the three Western powers to war; their confrontation ended in the famous Apia hurricane disaster of March 1889, in which six foreign warships were destroyed. To many observers the hurricane debacle symbolized the futility and the costs of continued Great Power rivalry over Samoa. One school of foreign opinion held that Westerners had erred in preventing the Samoans from settling the question of the Mālō militarily: “Make as many governments as you like there will always be two factions till one conquers the other” (Samoa Times, 16 Mar. 1889, 2). Nevertheless, the three powers attempted to exert more control in the immediate aftermath rather than less. Malietoa returned in 1889 and accepted the major factions’ decision to appoint Mata‘afa king and himself the vice-king (Gilson 1970: 417). But in the 1889 Berlin conference the Western nations proclaimed Malietoa Laupepa king, thereby assuring continued factional strife in the 1890s. Many claimed that Mata‘afa had the support of most Samoans,36 while the Laupepa government, ineffectual and isolated in Apia, was kept in power by Western naval support (Samoa Weekly Herald, 15 July 1893; Gilson 1970: 420). Mata‘afa styled himself Malietoa Mata‘afa, effectively asserting his equivalence with Laupepa, and both chiefs claimed the Tui A‘ana title. In 1893 Mata‘afa was deported and fines were imposed on the “rebel towns” (Samoa Weekly Herald, 29 July, 5 Aug.). But the rebellion continued, and foreigners despaired that a stable “kingship” was possible: “Whatever king you place upon the throne there is certain to be opposition within a very short time” (Chief Justice Cedercranz, in Samoa Weekly Herald, 16 Dec. 1893; cf. 2 Sept.). In 1895 the chiefs of Tumua issued a peace declaration, combined with a request that Malietoa resign: “The Tumua knows of no chief who would be acceptable to all Samoa. Therefore they ask … that the title of ‘King of Samoa’ be abolished.”37 Tumua asked

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for elections, a provision of the 1889 Berlin Act, and a meeting of Samoan chiefs to decide on a suitable form of government. But Laupepa was ill and new would-be kings were emerging. In 1898 Laupepa died and Mata‘afa returned to Samoa, precipitating the final act of the kingship struggle. Mata‘afa met an enthusiastic welcome from the Tupua family and was proclaimed king by Tumua and Pule, but he was opposed by the Tamasese and Malietoa factions, who supported Laupepa’s eighteen-year-old son Tanumafili (Gilson 1970: 425–7; Moors 1986 [1924]: 115). The Berlin Act provided that the highest legal authority in Samoa was the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and thus it came to pass that an American jurist named William Chambers came to decide the matter of the Samoan kingship in court. As evidence both the Mata‘afa and Tanumafili sides presented versions of custom and tradition. Tanumafili’s lawyers were Edwin Gurr and R.H. Carruthers, old Samoa hands with considerable knowledge of such matters, but Mata‘afa had only a German planter to represent him (Moors 1987 [1924]: 124–5). In the proceedings both Samoans and Europeans invoked indigenous modes of legitimation, such as genealogies and prior political fealty, to promote their candidate’s cause. But arguing the kingship in the context of “Samoan custom” inevitably opened the complex “evidence” to long-standing modes of contesting and challenge through partisan reinterpretation. That Tanumafili won may have been due at least in part to Gurr’s expertise and extensive research into Samoan political matters. In preparing his case Gurr38 marshalled an impressive array of genealogies, legends, and statements by orators, ranging over the fundamental issues in Samoan chiefly politics: the role of the tulāfale, the scope and authority of Tumua and Pule, the meaning and relative rank of pāpā and ao. Gurr used Newell’s work, which characterized Mata‘afa as an ao, a lesser title and, moreover, inferior in rank to Malietoa. Tanumafili claimed to hold the four pāpā, but this assertion was challenged by prominent orators on Mata‘afa’s side, citing “the customs of Samoa” and “Samoan beliefs” (“tū fa‘aSamoa”).39 Tanumafili was vulnerable on the issue of popular support (Moors 1986 [1924]: 115), and an American judge might be expected to take into account democratic ideals. To counter this point Gurr noted that majorities and the popular will have nothing to do with Samoan title decisions. To further undermine Mata‘afa’s credentials Gurr interpreted Tupua genealogies and the dying



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bequests (mavaega) of ancient chiefs to conclude: “Traditionally Mataafa ought not to be Tuiatua.”40 In the end, however, Chambers’s decision in favour of Tanumafili was based not on Samoan political custom but on a legal technicality. After the cultural evidence had been presented, Gurr and Carruthers argued that the protocols of the 1889 Berlin conference made Mata‘afa ineligible for kingship – an argument that Chambers accepted. On the day after the decision Mata‘afa’s forces occupied Apia; Tanumafili and Tamasese took refuge on a British ship in the harbour. The foreign consuls temporarily accepted Mata‘afa’s government but warfare broke out when American and British ships attempted to reinstate Laupepa (Moors 1986 [1924]: 126–52). The next and final international commission on Samoa concluded that the kingship was a concept foreign to Samoan culture and abolished the position (Moors 1986 [1924]: 159–68). Both Tanumafili and Chambers resigned, and the Great Powers developed the scenario for partition. Headed by the culturally astute Governor Wilhelm Solf, the German colonial administration of Western Samoa took a number of steps to forestall a resurgence of factional conflict over the paramount office. In place of the kingship Solf invented the office of Ali‘i sili or “highest chief” and appointed Mata‘afa to it. Solf emphasized repeatedly that the Kaiser was the highest authority over Samoa and the Ali‘i sili was but an underling. “Under all circumstances,” he wrote in his Annual Report, “the transfer of the title Tupu to Mataafa had to be avoided.”41 Not only was this the end of foreign designs for the kingship, but Solf’s long-term strategy for controlling the colony entailed systematically quashing the bases of Samoan national ambition. When the powerful orators raised trouble Solf “abolished” Tumua and Pule and forbade their mention in any ceremonial greeting (Samoanische Zeitung, 19 Aug. 1905). A new, officially authored and sanctioned national fa‘alupega greeting acknowledging the Kaiser (Kaisalika) first, then the Samoan Ali‘i sili, was promulgated instead.

Conclusion: A Structure of Resistance? In this essay I have examined the interaction of Western and indigenous political ideas in post-contact Samoa and have attempted to show how the conjunction of conceptual models played out in Samoan political action. I do not believe that Samoans ever had

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an indigenous “king” in the European sense. The Tafaifā was not a “king,” although it contained the notion of a unified Samoa; “unified” in what way remains unclear. Neither was the Tupu a monarch in its first incarnation, although in the late nineteenth century the term came to denote a Western-supported and, in part, Westernstyled “king.” Accordingly, neither were Tafaifā and Tupu conceptually equivalent or synonymous, though they came to be equated by both Samoans and foreigners in the course of the kingship disputes. Transformations in the meanings of Tafaifā and Tupu illustrate how foreign and indigenous concepts and constructions dynamically interact in contact situations. The vocabulary of “impacts” and “imposed” institutions cannot describe the cultural conjuncture that played out in the Samoan kingship saga. Western interpretations of the indigenous political system influenced Samoan attempts to design a government, as did the monarchical and parliamentary plans that foreigners variously promoted. Throughout, Samoans were not ineffectual recipients of colonial designs but creatively appropriated the Euro-American models presented to them, reinterpreting indigenous concepts in light of those models in order to advance culturally defined goals. Neither were the Samoan “kings” the puppets of foreign masters, but astute political operators attempting to take advantage of new sources of support and legitimation. In Samoan cultural politics the status quo, which Europeans saw as chronic disorder, was one of ongoing contestation between chiefly families. Supra-local ceremonial rank and political precedence had always been disputed in Samoa. The bases and the modes of competing for paramount authority were embedded in Samoan political process, which saw frequent low-level conflicts related to assertions of local autonomy and the protection of the “dignity” (mamalu) of titles, villages, and orator groups. During the kingship dispute the scope of paramount authority was extended in Samoan aspirations as chiefly factions came to pursue a monarchical vision of concentrated, centralized rule over the entire island chain. For their part, Westerners contributed to the efflorescence of Samoan chiefly rivalries by promoting self-interested political goals, and then by playing out their own national rivalries through partisan support of the contenders. Clearly, selective arms sales and military interference by colonial governments fomented the very disorder that foreigners aspired to cure with political engineering. Western interference



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had invidious effects on Samoan affairs, but Samoan intentions and actions were consequential in the denouement of the kingship dispute. My argument is not intended to reduce “the structure of the conjuncture” to the strivings of political agents, however. At a level quite distinct from the power seeking of ambitious individuals and factions, the culture in place affected the historical outcome. A dynamic, agonistic quality of contested decentralization was in the nature of the Samoan chieftainship. This quality brought EuroAmerican citizens and governments into a bitter conflict that, but for the hurricane disaster, seemed destined to escalate into an international war. For most of the nineteenth century, the contested decentralization of the Samoan political structure effectively thwarted the expansive mandate of imperial nation-states. During the past century anthropologists have documented innumerable contact situations in which trade goods and other introduced objects were creatively adopted by indigenous peoples, who situated them in native value schemes, incorporated them into customary exchanges, and variously put them to the service of culturally defined ends (see, e.g., Sahlins 1981a on the Hawaiian chiefs’ sumptuary use of Western goods). The Samoan kingship saga powerfully shows that introduced ideas and institutions, as well as material objects, are creatively interpreted in local settings and deployed in unexpected ways. In sites of foreign contact there is a dialectical interplay between indigenous and introduced ideas and symbolic schemes. Moreover, the kingship dispute is a cautionary tale for our own times, when the stated goal of US foreign policy is to replace authoritarian regimes abroad with our own model of national governance. From accruing and holding strategic territorial possessions, the mandate has shifted to that of aggressively “exporting democracy” to the unenlightened regions of the world.42 The events in nineteenth-century Samoa may appear alien and remote, but the goals and assumptions of the imperial nations during that period are strikingly familiar. In both cases, powerful industrial states decided that a Western governmental model would remedy political chaos in a peripheral place. Like “kingship,” “democracy” is a cultural idea as well as an institution. Like kingship, democracy is reinterpreted, given new meanings, and incorporated into the local scheme of things when it is introduced into a new cultural context. Like kingship, democracy cannot be “exported” without incurring unintended and unpredictable consequences.43

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Acknowledgments This chapter is based primarily on archival and documentary investigations conducted in several collections between 1985 and 1997. A sabbatical from the University of Hawai‘i and a fellowship at Macquarie University in Australia made possible research in the Mitchell Library, Sydney. A grant-in-aid from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research supported research in the National Archives of New Zealand and the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. A faculty development grant from the University of Hawai‘i funded investigations in the Nelson Memorial Library and the Marist Archives in Apia, (Western) Samoa. I thank all of these institutions for their generous support. For hospitality, patience, and instruction in matters fa‘a-Samoa, I extend my deepest gratitude to the Vaisagote family in Faleū, Manono. I thank John Mayer and Aumua Mata’itusi of the University of Hawai‘i for tutelage in Samoan language, culture, and ceremonial speech. During the long gestation of this essay several friends and colleagues have offered valuable comments and suggestions, including Stewart Firth, Kerry James, Samuel Martínez, Malama Meleiseā, and Caroline Ralston. For the deficiencies of the work, I alone am responsible.

Notes 1 Published sources will be cited in the body of the text, unpublished materials in endnotes. Citations to archival and manuscript sources employ the following abbreviations: ATL, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand; BCS, British Consular Archives, in NANZ; GAP, German Administration Papers (PMB 479); LMS SSL, London Missionary Society archives, South Seas Letters (Box/folder/jacket), microfilms in ML; ML, Mitchell Library, Sydney; MOM, Methodist Overseas Mission archives, in ML; NANZ, National Archives of New Zealand, Wellington; PMB, Pacific Manuscripts Bureau microfilms; SGP, Samoan Government Papers, in NANZ. 2 For the imperial perspective on this history, see Brookes (1941), Ellison (1938), Kennedy (1974), Masterman (1934), and Ryden (1933). Gilson’s history (1970) is regarded as authoritative for placing events within the Samoan cultural context. 3 Sunderland, 27 June 1854, LMS SSL 25/7/D; see also Williams (1832) in Moyle (1984: 238). 4 Letter, 8 Oct. 1835, MOM.



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5 Letter, 16 July 1836, MOM. Missionaries were making similar comments in 1870; cf. Pratt (1870) and Whitmee (1870) – both in LMS. 6 Captain Charles Hope of HBMS “Brisk,” July 1866, BCS 2/1; cf. Dyson (1882: 303); Pratt (1870); C.E. Stevens, Jan. 1876, BCS 7/3. 7 For European understandings and representations of monarchy, see Bloch (1973), Burns (1992), Cannadine (1983), Homans (1998), Le Roy Ladurie (1994). 8 Cf. Gilson (1970: 188), Hanson (1973), Holmes (1980), Marcus (1989), Meleiseā (1987), Sahlins (1958). 9 Erskine (1853: 85), Stevenson (1967 [1892]: 4). Peter Turner, letter of 16 July 1836, MOM; Williams (1832) in Moyle (1984: 238). 10 Robert Louis Stevenson, Samoa’s resident foreign celebrity in the 1890s, eloquently assessed the high chiefs as “a kind of a gagged audience for village orators … the chiefs of Samoa are surfeited with lip-honour, but the seat and extent of their actual authority is hard to find” (1967 [1892]: 4). 11 Ethnohistorical and scholarly sources concur on this point, see, e.g., Ella (1895: 597); Gilson (1970: 425–6); Edwin Gurr papers, ATL, folder 18; C.N.D. Hardie, ms “Diary of Rev. Charles Hardie, 1835–55,” p. 106, ML A368; Meleiseā (1987: 46–62). 12 In Samoan ceremonial greetings (fa‘alupega) and public oratory (lāuga), the local and regional factions that historically supported the holders of a particular chiefly title are referred to as the “families.” 13 There is ample ethnohistorical documentation of violent incidents provoked by insulting language or behaviour, pig stealing, breaches of etiquette, and title disputes, among other causes, see, e.g., Martin Dyson and Joseph King journals, ML; Samoan Reporter (1845–47, passim), in LMS, e.g. In the context of standing animosities between certain districts and localities, seemingly trivial altercations and disputes had the potential to escalate into wider conflicts. 14 Ms., ca. 1879, ML. 15 J.E. Newell papers, “Notes on Samoan customs in reference to Names and Titles,” LMS. 16 M. Dyson, 1863 journal, p 373, ML; A.P. Maudslay, “Memorandum on the State of Samoa,” 20 Oct. 1880, in Great Britain and Ireland Foreign Office Correspondence, F.O. 58/171; J. O’Hea, ms. “Journal of a Voyage to the South Sea Islands in the Eliza K. Bateson Brig,” 1862–63, ML ; Walpole (1849: 351); cf. Davidson (1967: 29). 17 Newell, “Notes on Samoan customs.” 18 My synopsis of the “war of the two Malietoas” is based on missionary George Turner’s manuscript, “The War in Upolu in 1869,” 16 Apr. 1869, LMS SSL, and on Gilson (1970: 259–90), Pratt (1870), and Whitmee (1870).

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19 Whitmee, 31 Aug. 1870, LMS SSL . 20 For the Steinberger affair, see Gilson (1970: 291–331), Ryden (1933: 95–9), Steinberger (1874). 21 Comments in contemporary archival materials include Goward to Seward, in Great Britain and Ireland (1878: 17); J. Mathison 2 Aug. 1876, MOM . 22 J.S. Austin, 10 Oct. 1877, MOM . 23 Maudsley to Gordon, Great Britain and Ireland (1878: 145); Samoa Times, 30 Mar. 1878, p. 2. 24 Gilson (1970: 345–57); A.H. Gordon, Memorandum, 10 May, Great Britain and Ireland (1879: 38). 25 E.g., to British Consul Swanston, 3 June 1879, BCS 2/1. 26 G. Pritchard, “Memo for the Consuls,” 14 Nov. 1879, BCS 2/1. 27 Gilson (1970: 376–82); Jan. 1885 correspondence in BCS 2/5. 28 Dated 19 Jan. 1885, BCS 2/5. 29 Dated 3 Feb. 1885, BCS 2/5. 30 “O le tu e masani ai lo matou nei atunuu.” My translation. 31 Ta’imua and Faipule to Powell, 28 July 1885, BCS 2/5. 32 Dated 18 Aug. 1885, BCS 2/5. 33 J.E. Newell papers, 7 Apr. 1885, LMS . 34 Correspondence in 1888, BCS 2/7; SGP , series 1. 35 Tumua and Pule and Aiga to British Consul Coetlogon 9 Sept. 1888, BCS 2/7. 36 One of his most prominent foreign supporters was Robert Louis Stevenson (1967 [1892]). 37 Dated 13 June 1895, SGP 2/2. 38 Ms papers of Edwin Gurr, ATL . 39 Tumua and Pule and Lauaki et al. to Chambers, 20 Dec. 1898, SGP 2/4. 40 Ms papers, folder 18, ATL . 41 GAP 17/C/7, 1900–1901. 42 For an introduction to the diversity of views on this policy, see Muravchik (1991), Lowenthal (1991), and Wiarda (1986, 1997). 43 Issues raised by the Samoan ethnohistorical investigations led to my current long-term research project, a study of comparative constructions of “democracy” in developing nations, with a focus on Latin America.

Slow Time: The Knowability of the Neolithic

3 Slow Time: Culture, Materiality, and the Knowability of the Neolithic Webb Keane Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time … Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

In its origins, anthropology was a response not only to the colonial encounter with difference, but also to the discovery of deep time (Shryock and Smail 2011, Trautmann 1992). One of the most dangerous consequences of the convergence of global reach and deep time, of course, was to conflate the two, equating others with ancients. Disciplinary self-critique eventually made it obvious that such an equation was hopelessly naive if not outright vicious, or worse. In response, many cultural anthropologists came to confine their claims to the particularity of local knowledge (Geertz 1983). Others moved toward an increasingly narrow focus on the present or very recent past. One outcome of this temporal narrowness has been a lack of perspective even on our own condition, a tendency to attribute to modernity either too much novelty, or none at all. Either all is changed, or it has always been thus. Against this trend, Marshall Sahlins’s work has taken place at both poles of the anthropological project, both its broadest perspective and its most fine-grained ethnographic specificity. It is exemplary in its refusal to insist that one must come at the expense of the other. If “The Original Affluent Society” (1972, first appearing in French, see 1968b) drew on comparisons across a vast range of cases, from

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contemporary ethnography to the archaeology of the Palaeolithic, Islands of History (1985a) argued for the specificity of old Hawai‘i, its incommensurability and irreducibility to terms defined within other worlds. At the same time, Sahlins’s work has given us one of the deepest analyses of the nature of the paradox that makes the comparative project so problematic. The theme is already there in “The Original Affluent Society” and still found in “Cosmologies of Capitalism” (1989b, 1994b) some twenty years later, although perhaps the fullest expression of the argument is developed by Culture and Practical Reason, chronologically midway between them in 1976. The paradox has one source in the way in which culture has been defined in contrast to determinism. Crucial to Sahlins’s understanding of culture is the principle of something that might be called (not, I think, his expression) collective choice. Cultural forms cannot be explained by necessity (e.g., the need for protein) or some mechanical principle of determination (e.g., the inexorable effects of new technologies). They express choices made by communities on the basis of values and goals that themselves cannot be reduced to some pre-existing rationale. Given certain ecological, demographic, and technological circumstances, the prevailing social arrangements, political interests, and cosmological orders could always have turned out other than they did. Cultural forms therefore manifest the fundamentally underdetermined character of human social life, its basic freedom from natural or mechanical determinism. In Sahlins’s later work, one implication of this assertion begins to emerge more clearly: since they are underdetermined, cultures are marked by an irreducible contingency in their very sources: they are inherently historical in nature. If this means they are irreducibly situated in time, we might extrapolate a further conclusion, that they are in some sense oriented to some projected future, even if that future is imagined as a continuation of the past. The retrospective understanding of the observer must not overlook this temporal character of cultural projects: if Cook is Lono, that is, in part, because he must become Lono. Contingent in their pasts, oriented to imagined futures, societies cannot be reduced to either an origin or a destiny. It is because of this principle of choice or relative freedom, that the human sciences cannot be modelled on the natural sciences, an assumption that came to dominate mainstream social and cultural anthropology after the 1960s (see Keane 2005). In the struggle to establish this principle, anthropologists of Sahlins’s generation



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tended to treat the opposition between choice and determinism as inseparable from that between the symbolic and material dimensions of society. That Sahlins’s position has largely won the day is evident in the way it has been taken up by many of those who are methodologically most rooted in the materiality of human worlds, archaeologists. For instance, David Lewis-Williams writes “increasing sedentism, socio-economic competition, climatic change and population increase do not in themselves lead inexorably to agriculture or the domestication of animals” (2004: 29), and Ian Hodder remarks of Grahame Clark approvingly “it was this social choice which, when released from environmental constraint, created the diversity of human culture” (1999: 177). Identifying deterministic explanation with materialism, and social choices with symbolism has had unintended consequences. By rendering the locus of choice in an immaterial domain, culture has effectively been removed from the realm of causality and even phenomenological experience to the extent that it is hard to see how choices could have consequences. Furthermore, if there is no exterior rationale for cultural choices, then there is no general principle by which cultural formations can be explained. Each must be taken on its own terms. Yet if each is taken on its own terms, there is no guarantee that any category of analysis can be legitimately applied across cases. If certain social or cultural forms can be explained by certain determinant conditions, it should in principle be possible to compare either similar forms or similar conditions. Not so if those forms are chosen. Cultures are, in principle, radically incommensurate. Yet the very argument itself rests on the most general kind of claim, that culture is by definition something that exceeds the demands of necessity, and that all humans are cultural, or, put another way, that to be human is to be defined by the principle of choices that go beyond necessity. On what basis can we make such broad claims? Another way of asking this question is this: how can we develop an anthropology that fulfils its original promise of breaking out of our limits in order to know worlds beyond our own? As a preliminary response to this question, I want to turn to an area of anthropology that has never abandoned the perspective of deep time, archaeology. For if cultural worlds are produced by human imaginings, over the very long run, it would be in the deep temporal perspective offered by archaeology that we may begin to get a hold on the way

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in which distinct worlds are constituted. It is because of my interest in these questions about the possibilities for comparison and the effort to overcome our temporal parochialism that in 2006 I agreed to take part in a project that lies dramatically far afield from my own scholarly territory in contemporary Indonesia, and accept an invitation to think about Neolithic religion in Turkey (see Hodder 2010, 2014). In this essay I want to explore the possibilities for comparison and the knowledge of deep time by looking at some questions raised by prehistoric evidence. Why even seek a Neolithic religion? After all, given the nature of the evidence, the chances of giving any demonstrable content to prehistoric religion are vanishingly small (for a review of the major approaches in archaeology, see Fogelin 2007). In the face of this, we may wonder what desire compels so elusive a quest. One element of this desire today seems to be the idea that religion, like culture, is a privileged locus for discovering human freedom from natural determinism and the concomitant ability to create new worlds and the work within realities that extend beyond the immediate here and now of direct experience. This doesn’t require a search for something that will fit the model of contemporary perceptions of religion as faith in something transcendental. Rather, we may recall here a remark of Leslie White’s that, in Sahlins’s words, “no ape … can tell the difference between holy water and distilled water” (Sahlins 2008e: 320). The category of religion, in this view, seems to stand in for, or to apotheosize, a distinctly human principle of constituted realities. Yet even if we provisionally accept this motive, how should we distinguish religion from the more general category of culture? Since the search for Neolithic religion depends, first, on defining religion in terms broad enough that they span the gap between discursively available worlds to the distant, silent, past, we could follow Talal Asad (1993; see also Masuzawa 2005) and cast a politically skeptical eye on the stakes and the interests in even asking for a definition of universal religion; however, that would be a different task (see Keane 2007, esp. chapter 3). For now I want to avoid the temptation to dismiss the question out of hand, since my aim is to keep open the question of deep time. If we accept that some speculation can be a useful way to open up the evidence, we must still be wary of the overwhelming tendency in religious speculation to project the author’s particular desires and preoccupations onto prehistory, prematurely



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eliminating what Hodder has called its “strangeness and ‘otherness’” (2006: 32). And yet, as Charles Sanders Peirce made clear long ago, science should involve a step we might call “a guess at the riddle,” the abduction of likelihoods, if it is not to be mired in narrow empiricism. So we are presented with the question of how to reconcile two demands, that we imagine ways to understand the evidence without foreclosing the possibility that what we are trying to imagine might be radically strange to us. In reviewing the archaeological record, I will suggest that much of what seems to fit received categories of religion lies at one end of a continuum of forms of attention and hierarchies of value that range from relatively unmarked to marked. Prehistory is, perhaps, the limit case for comparison or any knowledge of social and cultural things at all. What can we learn from the mute evidence of things? What can we know about the deep past? What of human creative activities might we draw out from the slow time of still objects? I will argue for a materialist semiotic that restores causality to our understanding of social processes without returning to reductionism, functionalism, or determinism. It does so by attending to the ways on which decisions must be realized materially, and therefore bring about new circumstances not simply as their purposes, but as the necessary pre-conditions demanded by those purposes. A materialist semiotic, combined with a fully social theory of objectification, can help us in rethinking the place of causality in the analysis of society and history.

Çatalhöyük’s Neolithic Çatalhöyük is the site of a Neolithic settlement in central Anatolia that was inhabited from about 7200 to 6200 BCE. By the beginning of this period, the process of sedentization was already well under way in the Middle East. Human sociality had reached at an unprecedented new scale, density, and degree of continuity over time. The domestication of food plants, sheep, and goats had been accomplished, although cattle remained wild. As elsewhere, the Neolithic in Anatolia was marked by a massive increase in the sheer quantity of things made by people, including buildings, pottery, and textiles. For the first time people were spending their daily lives in environments that were largely of human construction or subject to ongoing human manipulation, in towns, agricultural fields, and pastures (Watkins 2004). Rather than ranging widely in accord with the

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season, people’s activities were confined to a more or less bounded territory year round, although the people of Çatalhöyük also participated in some kind of long-distance exchange networks (for a recent summary, see Hodder 2007). Two things in particular have drawn special attention to Çatalhöyük: its architecture and its art. Çatalhöyük is unusual for its large size, with an estimated population between 3,000 and 8,000 (Hodder 2006: 56). It was a densely packed agglomeration of more or less similar rectangular buildings, interspersed with some herding pens (Düring 2001). Most of these houses contained ovens, hearths, food storage bins, pillars, and benches along some walls. In some houses, the dead were buried within the benches. Although the houses were similar in basic structure and size, and remained so for centuries, there are some important variables that distinguish among them. These are the presence or absence of burials, wall paintings, and mouldings (cut-out reliefs, animal sculptures, cattle horns, and other items set into the walls). It is above all these distinguishing elaborations – so-called art – that have made Çatalhöyük famous and have provoked most of the speculations about its inhabitants’ “religion.” Çatalhöyük has yielded the earliest known paintings on human-made surfaces, as opposed to rocks, cave walls, bone, or other natural objects. One of the bestpreserved paintings is commonly said to show large vultures with human feet and small, headless humanlike forms. Others display large animals (a stag, a boar, perhaps an equid) surrounded by numbers of small humans. One depicts what appear to be two cranes facing each other (Russell and McGowan 2003). The rooms’ walls also contain painted plaster reliefs of leopards and bears, and embedded in walls, pillars, and benches are bucrania, the plastered-over skulls and horns of wild cattle, sometimes set in rows, and skulls of fox and weasel. Some walls bore protuberances, within which were hidden the lower jaws of wild boars. Whereas these dramatic forms of elaboration are closely associated with architectural structures, there are also large quantities of tiny, crudely shaped figurines that are typically found in domestic rubbish heaps between houses, although some ended up in oven walls, in house walls, beneath floors, or in abandoned houses. Among these figurines is perhaps the most famous single object from Çatalhöyük, resembling a heavy-set human, apparently a female, her arms resting on two felines. This image helped give rise to the early



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speculations that Çatalhöyük was home to a Mother Goddess cult (Gimbutas 1982, Mellaart 1967; cf. Meskell 1998). Most, however, are more roughly shaped to form vaguely human or animal-like forms, in some cases with detachable heads or showing evidence of having their heads intentionally broken off (Voigt 2000, Nakamura and Meskell 2006, Meskell 2004). A few intriguing patterns are emerging from the data. First, certain kinds of art bear a strong relationship to specific locations within the dwellings, whereas others, notably the figurines, do not. By contrast to the figurines, the relief sculptures and bucrania are integral to the architecture, being embedded in walls, beams, and pillars (Hodder 1999: 188). Relief sculptures seem to have been long-lasting and subject to periodic renewal through replastering. Some evidence even suggests that old bucrania were dug out of older layers of the house to be retrieved for reuse when later houses were built (189). Just as bucrania were plastered, so too were some human skulls, which were, in effect “refleshed” (Hodder 2006: 148). If the reliefs were a more or less permanent feature of the experience of living in the house, and like plaster and whitewash, subject to periodic renewal, this was not apparently the case for paintings. The paintings were plastered over, and seem to have had a short life span, “rare, transient events” (Matthews, Wiles, and Almond 2006: 285). These paintings seem to occur primarily in the “cleaner” parts of the house, away from main food preparation and storage areas (Hodder 1999: 186). The subject matter of the paintings focuses on wild animals, above all, leopard and red deer. These are animals whose actual remains are rare in the settlement, in contrast to those of roe deer and sheep, the most common faunal remains, which are never portrayed in paintings. The buildings themselves range along a continuum from unelaborated to elaborated. A preliminary analysis (Düring 2001: 10–11; see also Düring 2003) found that 20 per cent of buildings have burials and mouldings. Sixty per cent of burials occur in buildings that also have elaborations such as mouldings. Only 20 per cent of buildings have elaborations. Hodder (2006: 50) sees this pattern of oppositions emerging from the data: pottery and utilitarian stone implements versus grave goods; everyday consumption of domesticated animals versus feasting on and portrayal of wild animals; southern part of the house versus northern; undecorated parts of house versus decorated; lower darker, dirtier floors near ovens versus whiter (plastered),

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cleaner floors near burials; and an overarching conclusion that these manifest a contrast between everyday routine and ritual life. In this latter conclusion we see one expression of the general run of interpretations, which takes decoration and art to be “symbolic” and therefore to be evidence of “religion.” This set of oppositions is potentially very productive, and I will draw on it. It can also, however, play into some old categories that may do as much to hinder our understanding as further it.

From “Art” to “Religion” at Çatalhöyük The Neolithic is commonly defined not only in terms of technological developments, plant and animal domestication, and new settlement patterns, but as ushering in a dramatic new degree of elaborateness in the human manipulation of symbols. Çatalhöyük’s art is famous, in part, because it seems to exemplify this new degree of symbolic activity (see Last 1998). Mimetic imagery in particular can promise a certain intimacy, for it seems to allow us to see through the eyes of others, and it is perhaps impossible to resist the feeling expressed by Augustin Holl, that “of all the artifacts left to us in the debris of vanished cultures … artworks bring us closer to their makers than anything else” (2004: 143). And in turn, it is Çatalhöyük’s “art” more than anything else that has inspired the most speculation about its inhabitants’ “religion.” In fact, it often turns out the relationship between art and religion is virtually pre-determined by the way in which the writers have defined them. In both cases, the main diagnostic by which any material remains are identified as art or as evidence of religion is their apparent lack of utility. According to Jacques Cauvin, for example, the symbolic revolution was manifested early through the appearance in Pre-Pottery Neolithic B of flint knapping on bipolar nuclei to produce fine regular blades, and the use of a flat lamellar retouch on blades, which, he says, takes them beyond the requirements of utility (2000: 243). Of the display of bull skulls, he writes: “These devices are obviously symbolic, for very little hunting of the wild bull itself took place” (238). Similarly, Bleda Düring’s (2001) careful analysis of the data on houses at Çatalhöyük shows a regular contrast between clean and dirty areas, an observation confirmed by micro analysis (see Matthews, Wiles, and Almond 2006). From this he draws the conclusion that these are respectively the “symbolically charged” and the domestic areas of



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the house. This pattern of diagnosis is widespread: in the absence of apparent utility, we must be in the presence of the symbolic. Given this definition of the symbolic, it typically follows, according to a distinction familiar in British social anthropology at least since Malinowski, that we are also likely to be in the presence of religion. Although by now it is a tired joke among archaeologists that any artifact whose use is not evident must be “ritual,” this way of defining religion retains its deep appeal. For example, it remains a central component of cognitive anthropologists’ definition of religion: as Harvey Whitehouse writes, “What both ritual and art have in common is their incorporation of elements that are superfluous to any practical aim and, thus, are irreducible to technical motivations” (2004: 3). There are a number of problems with the assumptions these approaches display. First, of course, is the sheer difficulty of accurately identifying a lack of utility. Just as the absence of proof cannot be taken as a proof of absence, so too the investigator’s inability to imagine a use for something may demonstrate nothing more than the limits of his or her imagination – or breadth of ethnographic knowledge. What could be more useless than the study of a “dead” language like Latin? But it is only useless if one does not, say, think it is the actual language of God, has magical powers, or, if one ignores the utility of the social status gained by conspicuous display – matters of semiotic ideology. Or, again, when Constantine placed the Christian labarum sign on his soldiers’ shields, it was not as a useless symbol: he was activating divine power. More important, however, is the effort to isolate “the symbolic” as a distinct domain within the range of empirical observations. This reproduces an invidious dichotomy, in which the symbolic stands apart from – and, by implication, is supplemental to – the truly useful, much as superstructure stood to infrastructure, in the old model. Yet an enduring insight of Sahlins is that the human activities cannot be separated into discrete symbolic and useful domains, for even hunting reflects cultural choices made on the basis of certain values. So we might turn back to Cauvin’s bull skulls: suppose they were displayed by people who regularly ate the animals, would that make their display any less symbolic? It is no doubt significant that the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük portrayed and displayed the skulls of animals they rarely hunted and that were not their primary sources of food. And this pattern does

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suggest that such animals were foci of particular kinds of attentiveness and interest. It does not follow from this that the display of bucrania is peculiarly symbolic in ways that the making of pottery, harvesting of lentils, or the marrying of cousins are not. Nor is this evidence that wild animals are somehow more symbolic than domesticated ones. People of Sumba, where I have lived (Keane 1997, 2007), can talk endlessly about the qualities of cattle and the wealth, powers in exchange relations, and thus, by hypothesis, ancestral blessings they manifest. This interest in itself makes them neither more nor less useful than deer, dogs, and chickens. This isolation of the symbolic from the instrumental has consequences for how one thinks of religion, as a priori a distinct sphere apart from supposedly everyday activity. I stress this point both because of the bearing it has on the specific problem of interpreting evidence for prehistoric religion, and because it reveals one set of consequences that follow from defining culture as a domain that manifests a principle of (relative) human freedom from natural determinism. If culture is defined as being the domain of social choices, in contrast to necessity, the domain of natural determinism, then things that seem to reflect a lack of necessity are, ipso facto, cultural. The cultural, in this pattern, is a general principle whose specific manifestations are those things called symbolic. To separate the archaeological evidence into things that are useful and those that are symbolic implies that the practical side of human activity is not symbolic. This point is important because other analytical consequences follow. The putative distinction between instrumental and symbolic is the basis on which most of the theories of religion in Çatalhöyük have been based. A second problematic feature of the common ways of talking about the symbolic follows from the first. If one identifies necessity with the material world of cause and effect, then it often follows that culture will be identified with immaterial ideas. To the extent that the symbolic is an autonomous domain and identifiable with a certain class of non-instrumental objects, then those objects themselves have a distinctive relationship to the world of thought and activity. That relationship is typically one of representation: the material object expresses, and is logically secondary to, the idea that gave rise to it. Carolyn Nakamura and Lynn Meskell (2006: 229) summarize the main principled objection to the very idea of representation in the context of archaeological artifacts quite well:



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The notion of representation entails a remove from the real, it depicts a likeness, rendition or perception rather than the immediacy of the object in question … By employing the notion of representation we infer that figurines stand in for something real and are a reflection of that reality, of someone or something. And yet these objects are not necessarily referent for something else tangible, but could be experienced as real and tangible things in themselves. The point does not just hold for the distant world of the Neolithic. As Hans Belting (1994) has argued, early Christian icons functioned to make divinity present, not to depict it; in India, the image of a god can be that gaze to which the worshipper makes himself or herself visible (Davis 1997, Pinney 2004; cf. Morgan 2005). And, in Alfred Gell’s (1998) view, many visual experiences function to dazzle or trap the viewer. Finally, some visual images, such as Navaho sand paintings or Walbiri drawings are best understood as the outcomes of the processes by which they were created, and eventually destroyed, rather than as things to be looked at. Even an image that is meant to be viewed by a spectator presupposes significant material conditions. To treat artifacts, or even pictures, as representations is to look beyond their fundamental materiality and all that makes it possible – from motor and cognitive skills to the availability of resources – and that follows from it.

Representations of Religion Despite the critique of representation, discussions of prehistoric religion at Çatalhöyük still tend to treat material objects as representing ideas, and reveal some of the analytical consequences. Cauvin, for instance, pays special attention to the bull horns embedded in the walls and to what he takes to be females carved in stone and moulded in clay. From these he concludes: “These two figures, the woman and the bull, were destined to represent the divine couple, the mother-goddess and bull-god, which were to persist in the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean from the Neolithic until the classic period” (2000: 238). There are good reasons to be wary of this reading and its bold leap across millennia. What I want to stress here is how the concept of representation induces Cauvin to see them as related, rather than saying anything about their form,

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means of production, location, or evidence of treatment. They form a complex because they are both representations. Much of his subsequent interpretation depends on this initial step of grouping them together as a complex. Cauvin takes the horns and figurines to stand for something other than themselves, a bull deity and goddess, respectively. In the case of figurines and paintings – but not that of horns embedded in walls – the basic phenomenology of human visual experience no doubt justifies a mimetic or iconic interpretation: there is at least resemblance to something else. Does iconicity, however, warrant the next step, to representation, and from there to concept? Without some access to the discursive regimentation and semiotic ideologies that guide any culture of image-making and -using, this step from object to idea is hard to justify. The representational approach to material evidence plays an especially important role in the major cognitivist interpretations of Çatalhöyük religion. This is perhaps not surprising, given the two foundational premises of this approach. One, already mentioned, is that religion, like art, is defined in opposition to practicality. The second is that religion consists primarily of beliefs. It follows from this that material objects, like practices, are derivative of those beliefs. The task, then, is how to get from the object to the belief. For Mithen (1998), this means taking the paintings of Çatalhöyük as directly mimetic depictions of beings that form the content of people’s beliefs. His analysis of certain images as metaphorical combinations of elements from different cognitive domains depends on the initial assumption that material things are expressions of ideas. A similar representational approach to the evidence from Çatalhöyük is given by Trevor Watkins (2004). He describes the transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic as a shift in balance between nature and culture, in which people “devised means of embodying abstract concepts, beliefs and ideas about themselves and their world in externalized, permanent forms” (97). In both cases, the special interest in cognition leads Mithen and Watkins to treat material things as evidence for immaterial concepts. There is certainly nothing wrong with this as an analytical strategy. Yet the temptation arises to treat them as substitutes for the discourses we lack, as if images were the texts that would speak to us from the silence of the objects around them. This becomes problematic when it also leads us to assume that things function in order to express concepts.



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Ideas leave material traces only to the extent they take the form of activities. This point is not merely a methodological scruple. It may be a more realistic way to think about even mental life, as it is lived within society. Once we try to look past the things, in our effort to get at ideas, their materiality ceases to be informative. Nevertheless, that materiality is crucial to their place within social life – just not as a determinant. It is as material things that pictures and figurines, houses and burials form contexts, have causes and effects, are publicly available to other people, have histories. These are characteristically left out of representational approaches. And it is here that a materialist semiotics might begin to look.

Wild Animals, Killers, and Meat Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

The period of the Neolithic in which Çatalhöyük thrived was at a tipping point in the processes of domestication. I do not mean this in the teleological sense that history has directionality, with the fallacy that results from assuming people in Çatalhöyük somehow knew where they were heading. Rather, the sense of a tipping point may have taken the form of people’s sharpened awareness of contrasts that they found interesting. In the local political economy, foraging was giving way to agriculture, and hunting to herding. The predominant faunal remains at Çatalhöyük come from domesticated animals like sheep and goats, and the implication is these were the primary sources of meat. Yet the buildings contain bucrania from wild bulls and depictions of bulls, deer, leopards, and equines. Moreover, there is evidence of occasional feasting on some (but not all) of these large wild animals. Taken together, this suggests that wild animals had some grip over people’s imagination. No doubt hunting held power over the imagination for Paleolithic hunters as well. What is important at Çatalhöyük is that it now formed a contrast to animals that are not hunted. After all, sheep and goats were also killed and eaten, so neither the fact of killing nor eating distinguishes the bulls and deer. In this semiotic economy, deer and bulls were not only

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things that humans kill and eat, they were also animals that were not domesticated. The wild and domesticated contrast seems not just to be an opposition that we, the observers, impose on the people of Çatalhöyük, but rather an approximation of a focus of attention and interest of their own that seems to be emerging from the material remains. Some observers take the remains of bulls and the depictions of leopards as evidence that violence played a central role in Çatalhöyük religion. The category of violence is excessively capacious, however, and encompasses everything from the excited sadism of bear baiter or lynch mob to the indifference of the butcher or the hitman. Those who obtain meat themselves rather than from the market, and those who have never formed relations with pets, may not see the killing of animals to be violence at all. Here I will draw, cautiously, on the slaughter of buffalo in contemporary Sumba, not as an analogy – there are far too many differences of context – but as a provocation to the imagination. First, unlike aurochs but like the sheep and goats of Çatalhöyük, Sumbanese buffalo are domesticated, and some myths suggest they are actually held in contempt for having surrendered their powers of speech along with their autonomy in return for the ease of life in the corral (Hoskins 1993). Second, Sumbanese buffalo killing takes place at the apex of a hierarchy of sacrificial value that also includes offerings of betel nut and the killing of chickens, pigs, and horses. It is a hierarchy that reflects a number of things, one of which is the kind of labour, the extent of kinship ties, and the powers of exchange relations that are concretized in the very existence of the animal in the first place (see Keane 1997, chapter 3). Third, what ritual specialists consider the most important elements of these sacrifices leave no material traces: the act is framed by spoken prayers, and the response of the spirits must be sought through divinatory reading of the entrails of the victim. When I lived on Sumba, chicken sacrifice was far more common than that of larger animals, but the act of killing chickens elicited little interest. The killing of small and weak animals not only lacks drama, it offers little opportunity for spectatorship. Buffalo slaughter, on the other hand, is a hugely popular spectacle. It takes place in the village plaza, and everyone who is able to watch does so with great enthusiasm. What is that enthusiasm about? To start, there is a certain thrill in the sheer display of wealth and its expenditure.



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The killing produces huge quantities of meat, which people anticipate with enormous relish. Many spectators focus on the bravado of the young men who undertake the killing, and the risk at which this places them. And people seem to find the fatal blow of the machete and the struggles of the buffalo to be fascinating. What do Sumbanese see in the spectacle? Power, domination, fear, the display of athleticism, identification with or a vast sense of distance from the victim, sadism or empathy, excitement at the dramatic movements, and amusement at the occasional slapstick may all be involved. Janet Hoskins points out that Sumbanese often laugh at the sight of the slaughter. She says this is a nervous response to their ambivalence and suggests they are identifying with the animal but also ridiculing it for allowing them to humiliate it. In her view, the killing works in part to externalize aspects of themselves that they want to eliminate. The slaughter of buffalo also results in their internalization as meat. Sumbanese love to eat meat, but do so only at ceremonial feasts. These bodily pleasures are inseparable from the giving and receiving they presuppose, the commensality and reciprocity. Confronted with evidence of killing, we cannot be sure that violence is the principal focus of attention, or even fear and pain, sadism or empathy. It may also be mere excitement, in which the spectacle of killing is inseparable from the stimulation of being in a crowd – even a Durkheimian collective effervescence – and the anticipation of the feast. So if Sumbanese objectify themselves in the form of the sacrificial animal, they also absorb that objectified beast into themselves in the form of dead flesh. They internalize the meat that results, and they are very aware of the pleasures of satiety and renewed vigour this produces. The dead body of the animal becomes part of the revitalized living body of the feasters; the animal rendered an object of human actions contributes to their constitution as subjects both through the agency by which they kill the beast and through the act of consumption by which they appropriate it to themselves. Perhaps what we can say is this is a kind of objectification, an externalization of an aspect of oneself, at the same time that it is a subjectification of the object world. The objectification process leaves traces not just in the bodies of the eater, but in their houses. Thus the mandibles and horns are indexical icons of accumulated events of feasting (Keane 1997; see

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also Adams 2005, Hodder 2005). It is important to observe the complementary distribution between representations and the major sources of food. Sheep and goats may be good to eat but they are not good to display. They are the essential objectification of human agency, and yet they do not stand for it in the most marked contexts. It may not just be the danger and violence of wild animals that is interesting about them, but the way in which they live at the very edges of human control: we can kill them, yet nothing is guaranteed. The fully domesticated animal, on the other hand, is too thoroughly subjected. The house bears the marks of certain killings, those of bulls, and not others. Faced with such ethnographic comparisons, which of course could be multiplied endlessly, we can’t be sure of the meaning of violence, or indeed, if violence really is the point (see Bloch 1992). We have evidence that people at Çatalhöyük were interested in wild animals. We can surmise it is the wildness of leopards, bulls, and deer, in contrast to the domesticated herds that intrigued them. We have evidence of feasting, and perhaps the spectacle of killing. In the latter, however, we cannot know if the dominant key is fear, pain, prowess, sadism, domination, the thrill of the crowd, and/or the pleasures of the feast. The category of “violence” is both too general and too narrow. There is yet another aspect of killing to consider as well. As Valerio Valeri (1985) observed, killing dramatizes the ubiquitous experience of transformation or transition from presence to absence, writing that “sacrificial death and destruction are also images; they represent the passage from the visible to the invisible and thereby make it possible to conceive the transformations the sacrifice is supposed to produce” (69). This is borne out in the case of Sumbanese killing, which is meant as a bridge to the invisible world. Sacrificial animals convey messages between the manifest world of the living and the invisible world of the dead. In Sumba, sacrificial killing must always include words, and the reading of entrails. These foreground the fact that the killing is a transition between perceptible and imperceptible worlds (see Keane 2009). Forms of communication such as these would leave no archaeological traces. Nevertheless, the evidence at Çatalhöyük suggests people had some interest in the play of visible and invisible, presence and absence. This, at least, is one way of thinking about the mandibles hidden in the walls, the plastering over of paintings, and the corpses



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interred in the benches, invisible presences of which it is reasonable to assume at least some people were aware. Perhaps we do not have to decide which aspect of killing feasting is the key one. These aspects are all bundled together (see Keane 2003). All components of this bundle of features (wealth, social power, domination over the wild, youthful folly, masculine bravado, plentitude and the feelings of meaty satiation, aggression, fear, transition from visible to invisible, from living animal to dead meat, and incorporation of edible object into vital subject) are in principle available for attention, elaboration, and development. Different components of this bundle may come into play in different circumstances; some that were only latent in one context may become prominent in another.

Toward a Materialist Semiotic Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

It may well be that all human worlds require the imagining of entities and even agents that lie beyond perceptible experience – the mere existence of kinship systems already seems to require relations with people at a distance from one’s immediate sensory range, and usually, with dead and future generations (see Kopytoff 1971). This does not, however, require a leap into transcendentalizing faiths; nor does it give us licence to imagine any society ever lived in some simple mystical unity with the spirit world. Rather, we should expect to find marked and unmarked components of existence, some subject to greater attention, circumspection, and discursive elaboration than others. Near the more marked end of this continuum, the conditions for the exercise of people’s powers and social relations come to the foreground, objectified as the outcome of the processes by which they have been materialized. In objectified form, human and animal (and whatever other kinds of agency might be taken to exist) take public form, available for people’s perceptions and subject to their moral evaluations. In such marked and unmarked distinctions as that between domesticated and wild, unelaborated house and elaborated, seem to indicate where we will find hierarchies of value, and there may be where the projects or fears that give content to

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what we like to call “religion” are to be found. If this sounds like a call to return to structuralist oppositions, there is an important difference: these are not merely thought worlds alone and they are not expressed through arbitrary signs. The conditions of materiality play a crucial role in their meaning, social consequences, and historical character. I began by asking what might allow cultural anthropologists to think comparatively and, in particular, to restore the perspective afforded by the encounter with deep time. It will not come simply from reviving the old categories on which comparison once rested. These have been laid low not just by political critique but by the more abstract thesis that the social formations are products of choices and are therefore irreducibly historical and particular in character. Yet if the result is to conclude we can seek no more than local knowledge, we lose a vital perspective. One response has been the effort to revive universals of thought. One of the most self-confident of these revivals is the new evolutionism in cognitive anthropology. This is not the place to address this approach; I do, however, want here to consider one problem it faces, that of material evidence. For archaeologists, of course, the silence of things makes a virtue of the necessary focus on materiality. Moreover, such a focus can be useful on more general grounds. The argument between determinism and cultural choice in the 1960s and 1970s tended to reproduce a dichotomy between materialism and idealism. One result was that materiality came to be identified with reductive determinism. To the extent that culture was identified with ideas, the material dimensions of social existence were commonly treated as not much more than expressions of those immaterial concepts and categories. This was reinforced within the structuralist tradition by the doctrine of the arbitrariness of the sign: nothing about the material qualities of cultural signs, or the causal circumstances in which we find them, contributed to their meaning apart from their capacity to distinguish one sign from another. Materiality was identified with the domain of necessity, ideas with that of freedom. Although the debates have moved on, these dichotomous tendencies persist. A materialist semiotics places signs within the material world – not, however, by restoring determinism (for the use of semiotics in archaeology, see Preucel 2006). To understand this, consider the idea of indexicality. Most archaeological evidence is indexical in character. That means we understand it with reference to an actual



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world of causes and effects. Ashes are indexical of ancient fires, scarred faunal remains of ancient slaughters. Indexicality has two important distinctive characteristics. In the first place, using the language of Peircean semiotics, it is a “Second.” That means, in itself, an index is evidence of something that actually happened. It is neither a mere possibility (as a picture can resemble a non-existent creature like a unicorn) nor a rule (as a spoken sentence is one instance of an indefinitely repeatable linguistic structure). Any given index is a singularity: these ashes index the particular fire that produced them. The second characteristic of indexicality follows from this: indexes are underdetermined for significance. An index cannot in itself specify what it is indexical of. That requires some further inference. To the extent those inferences are coherent and repeatable across instances, relatively predictable, this is because they are organized by a meta-level of semiosis, a Third, that is, a rule for interpreting them. Commonly this meta-indexical framing of indexical signs is found in discourse: but prehistorical materials lack evidence of discourse. One result of the lack of meta-level guidance to indexical evidence is that it is very difficult to determine the difference between the contingent outcomes of actions and the goals of actions. It is common to interpret the visual experience of the wall paintings in Çatalhöyük as being a purpose of the painters’ activities. The assumption is that their creators were producing images so that they could be seen later. Yet this is not necessarily the case. We know from examples such as Navaho sand painting (Newcomb and Reichard 1937) and various kinds of Aboriginal design (Munn 1973) that the process of making the image may be the point, and the resulting image may quickly be destroyed. In Çatalhöyük, the paintings may have been plastered over, and the handprints might be the results of some activity in which painted hands are placed on the wall. If we cannot know for sure whether the evidence is indexical of a purpose, what can we know? First, indexicals are socially significant if they are produced in relation to Thirds of some sort. The most obvious example is sinsigns of a legisign, that is, tokens of types, such as linguistic signs (a word, as a singular, concrete, utterance – what I hear in a given moment of speech – instantiates an abstract linguistic entity). Since a Third is virtual, a rule for use, the task is to seek evidence for a rule. Yet in a sense we needn’t seek out the cognitive correlates: we can seek the kinds of repetition that

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seem to treat indexicals as knowable – not to us, but to those who respond to them in further acts. Here the multi-generational pattern of floor plastering and figurine production at Çatalhöyük may be much more significant than dramatic but singular artifacts like the famous “mother goddess” statue. In seeking out repetition, however, we should not imagine we are finding the instantiation of a rule. As Wittgenstein (1953) pointed out long ago, the idea of following a rule poses extraordinary difficulties – a point that Bourdieu (1977), among others, elaborated for ethnographic analysis. Systems of legisigns may perhaps be better understood as emergent modes of reflection upon specific, perceptible events. The reflections offer retrospective abductions that take actual events to have been, after all, sinsigns, that is, instances of what are only in hindsight seen as their governing principles. (This, I think, is one way to generalize Marshall Sahlins’s arguments in Islands of History.) Second, of any evidence we should seek out the conditions for the possibility of producing it. As Hodder (2006: 60) points out, to plaster the walls of a house required marl extraction plots, tools for digging, containers to carry the mud, and some kind of division of labour and allocation of time. Somewhat more speculatively he surmises the latter conditions would also have meant ways of gathering and organizing people, feasts, and the killing of animals. Hodder calls this “a network of entanglement.” One important aspect of this is that material entanglements produce and are produced by social ones. Although the usual view of the social division of labour is that it makes people depend on one another, we might also see the material artifacts this labour involves as making possible a distribution of agency across a social field. The materialization of human activity makes it public and extends the activities of some people into those of others. Religious activity just like any other enters into the experiences of other people first by virtue of its materiality. People do not have direct access to ideas, but to words, actions, and things. They respond to these material mediations not just by decoding them to get at ideas, but also realize the possibilities they afford in all sorts of ways. They recognize something in their material circumstances, yet given the excess of qualitative and practical possibilities those circumstances afford, what they recognize is underdetermined. To draw on examples closer to home: what was heartfelt prayer for Aquinas became monstrous babble to Luther; a devotional offering by Bach is high art to most modern audiences (see Keane 2007).



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The material outcomes of people’s activities make it possible for other people to treat them as indexical, drawing inferences about what made them possible. If people do in fact draw such inferences (and whether and how they do so is a matter of particular semiotic ideologies), the material objects enter into semiotic economy, and with the result that their meaningfulness is part of a causal logic. For instance, the presence of plastered walls allows the inference that people had been organized to do the work, just as the presence of bucrania might index past feasts and that of fine obsidian access to distant resources. It is important, however, to observe that such potential interpretations are not necessarily ever realized; nor are they necessarily any guide for future actions. The conditions of possibility are only conditions, not goals. And, as Sahlins warned long ago, there is no reason to assume they are based on some particular set of utilitarian judgments or practical reasons that would be obvious to us. We must be wary of the pressure to teleological thinking. The hunt cannot be quite the same when there are also domesticated herds, neither at the level of meaning (because now hunting stands in conceptual contrast to herding) nor practice (time and energy spent hunting could have been used for making pots, flaking obsidian, cultivating fields, telling myths, negotiating marriages, and so forth). The outcome of the hunt objectifies these possibilities. That does not necessarily mean that objectification is in itself meaningful, in the sense that it gives rise to concepts. But once objectified, an activity or artifact is available for meaningfulness and for moral evaluation, as an object for an acting and thinking subject. A more useful distinction than that between symbolic and practical or material would be that among degrees of markedness of attention: objectification is one way to mark out certain parts of experience for special attention, vis-à-vis its relationship to human subjectivity and agency. Artifacts are potentially indexical since they bear the traces of the actions of those who made them. Confronted with those artifacts, people may not necessarily recognize that agency, or take it to be interesting. Conversely, they may also impute agency to objects we might consider “natural” in origin – rocks may speak, for instance (Urban 1996). Nevertheless, to the extent that they do draw inferences about agency from the artifacts around them, those objects are indispensable media by which agency comes to be dispersed or distributed, and thus, by which discrete actions in the past may become part of social worlds in the present. This may be

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the case for a house, a wall painting, even a herd of domesticated sheep, and it holds true regardless of either explicit meanings or their apparent utility. A materialist semiotics seeks out the logical-causal nexus behind objectification, and not just the causes or effects, mental or sociological, of that nexus. That means taking causality as one possible but not necessary source of the potential meaningfulness of the objectification. A materialist semiotics does not assume that any particular social arrangement is either caused by or leads to any particular set of material circumstances. It does, however, take seriously two aspects of the materiality of social life. First, all social action is mediated in some material form and is therefore subject to causality, to unintended consequences, to history. Second, all human experience is in part a response to the experience of material forms that, at least since the Neolithic, were created by previous human actions, which form part of their context: however private the initial impulse behind an action, its materiality gives it an inevitably social character. If cultural life entails choices, and those choices are primarily conceptual in nature, then our access to the deep past will be extremely limited. If, however, those choices always take material form, respond to material contexts, and open up new material possibilities, then they enter into causal worlds in ways that may allow us some purchase on them as elements of causal logics. Local knowledge is not just a system of conceptual categories; it is also a way into the nexus of causes and logics whose particular conjunctions are never generalizable – for one thing, they remain subject to both retrospective abductions and the prospective cast of human projects – yet whose materiality opens up the possibility for comparison across cases. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Ian Hodder for inviting me to join the Templeton Çatalhöyük project, to Maurice Bloch, Lynn Meskell, Peter Pels, Andrew Shryock, Leron Shults, Harvey Whitehouse, and Norm Yoffee for their input, and especially to Marshall Sahlins for encouraging anthropologists to think big. Parts of this essay appeared in different form in Keane (2010).

4 From Jew to Roman: Mr Joske, Mr Brewster, The Hill Tribes of Fiji, and the Hill Tribes of Fiji Martha Kaplan Primary Sources. Many of the main authorities are also significant actors in the events they relate, in one way or another authorized to represent the structures in play … [A]t least as important as the supposed “biases” introduced by the particular interests of the journalists is the fact that their interests and biases are constitutive of what they are talking about. For an ethnographic history, the so-called distortions of firsthand observers and participants are more usefully taken as values than as errors. They represent the cultural forces in play. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu

Most scholars of Fiji are familiar with Adolph Brewster Joske, British colonial official, amateur anthropologist, and memoirist, through his books The Hill Tribes of Fiji and The King of the Cannibal Isles, books published in 1922 and 1937, respectively. By the time he published these works, he had retired to England (in 1910) and changed his name to A.B. Brewster. Some Fiji scholars have also read his copious administrative correspondence and reports, held at the Fiji National Archives and the Fiji Museum. For information on the cultural lives and political fortunes of the people of the highlands of Viti Levu, Fiji, The Hill Tribes, in particular, is an invaluable source. It is also, as Marshall Sahlins (Kirch and Sahlins 1992) reminds us, a source on

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the cultural lives and ambitions of Victorian colonial officials, and a guide to the cultural forces in play. This essay on Mr Joske and the hill tribes of Viti Levu, Fiji, moves between an analysis of his ethnography and memoir as colonial discourse and an analysis of the Fijian history-making into which his colonial project fell. We will see Mr Joske as an agent of colonial power and as a complex person enmeshed in colonial contradictions of Fiji and beyond. We will meet his most interesting Fijian contemporary and foil, Mosese Dukumoi (also known as Navosavakadua), the prophet leader of many of the hill tribes. To do this, we will read Mr Joske’s The Hill Tribes of Fiji in two ways: first, as a text of its time, which tells us much about Mr Joske, colonial Fiji, and the global British Empire; and, second, as a source of information about the hill tribes of Fiji, one among many sources about a dynamic history of hinterland Fijians in the era of Navosavakadua. From the work of Marshall Sahlins this consideration of the force of Mr Joske’s texts in the midst of Fijian colonial history draws its focus on the relation of culture, historicity, and power. When anthropology took a historical turn in the 1970s and 1980s, we can see three quite distinct senses of what history meant for the study of culture and what culture meant for the study of power. For world system theorists, led by Eric Wolf, culture required to be contextualized analytically within regional and global inter-relations, especially of European colonialism and capitalism. The dynamism of the situation was political-economic, whether involving the largely European structures of colonialism and exploitation or the local forms of resistance. Culture was situated within power, not the source of it, and power and history-making were understood in political-economic terms. In a more nuanced way, for anthropologists of colonial discourse, from Talal Asad (1974) to Bernard Cohn (1987, 1996) the goal was to denaturalize and analyze colonial projects, finding the powers in their discursive forms. In the work of Sahlins, however, the historical turn was to show the power and history in all cultures. Sahlins’s historical anthropology focuses especially on non-Western histories, the historical agencies of imagined cold societies, to consider the way culture(s) make histories. He locates power in all culture (all cultures), but does not specify in advance the forms that power may take, nor the circumstances that may evoke it. This essay does not seek to illustrate different historicities of British and Fijian structures. It does seek to illustrate two culturally contextualized



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individual histories: histories of two self-understood lawgivers in the hills of Fiji at the end of the nineteenth century. Taking The Hill Tribes as colonial text we can read it as a chronicle of colonial self- transformation. It is by now a truism to observe of colonial societies that colonial elites are not necessarily the elites of the metropole. In Fiji at the turn of the century, A.B. Joske transformed himself from merchant of dubious background to pillar of Empire, from Adolph Brewster Joske to A.B. Brewster, what I would partly playfully describe as a self-transformation from Jew to Roman. His media were written narratives and imagery: official minute papers, amateur anthropological texts, and photographs. His portrayal of Fijians was detailed, curious, and often empathetic, but to image his self as staunch colonial, he needed contrasting images of disorderly Fijian and Indian others. He created vivid portraits with word and camera of dark bilious charlatan prophets, fisher maidens, cannibal kings, excellent cooks, and of himself as Commissioner and Magistrate. An extremely self-conscious lawgiver, Joske/ Brewster used Fijians (and occasionally Indians) and the spectre of their disorder to transform his own colonial social identity. Crucial to the effects of his gaze, both on himself and on the Fijians, was the audience receiving his report: other Fiji whites and the British at home. Joske could gaze, but not just as he pleased. Thinking about the hill tribes of Fiji as they made history in terms their own and new, given, and innovative, we can consider other selftransformations ongoing. When Mr Joske arrived in Fiji and in the hills of Viti Levu, he arrived into a complex cosmological and historical social landscape. As Sahlins has shown (1985a), nineteenthcentury Fijian culture was organized, pervasively, by an opposition between socio-cosmological principles of sea and land. Founding chiefs were understood culturally as sea people, originally strangerkings who married women of the land, founding the lines of chiefs of the great coastal kingdoms. Ritual experts and commoners were constructed culturally as people of the land. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the coasts of Viti Levu and in the Fijian islands to the east, Fiji was organized in hierarchical chiefly-led kingdoms that were in constant relations of alliance, exchange, and contest with each other and with the kingdom of Tonga to the east. The social acts of chiefs became total social facts of a particular (heroic history) kind, not merely charismatic or providers of “models for” the behaviour of followers, but directly constitutive of the relations

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of their polity. If a Bauan chief married into the lineage of Rewa, for example, then his whole polity was related to Rewa with implications from exchange rights to military duties (and of course the histories of actual kinship set the likelihood, though not the inevitability, of such a marriage in the first place). From the 1840s on, Christian missionaries and early white settlers brought their own projects, but were integrated into chiefly-political aims. By 1854, Fiji became Christian (or at least coastal Fiji and the islands became Christian) when Cakobau of the powerful kingdom of Bau converted (Sahlins 1985a: 37). By the time of cession to Britain in 1874, Cakobau was acknowledged by most coastal Fijians and by white observers as the king of Fiji. He and fourteen other chiefs signed the Deed of Cession that made Fiji a British colony. Chiefs made history in Fiji, through the process Sahlins has called heroic history. But the hill peoples of Viti Levu were quintessential people of the land. They organized themselves differently, into relatively smaller, far less hierarchical polities (Kaplan 1995). Most importantly, those in Viti Levu island’s North East understood themselves in relation to their construction of the place where they lived: in and adjacent to the Nakauvadra Mountain Range, home of extraordinarily powerful Fijian ancestor gods. Indeed, we know of this in part because of Mr Joske’s Hill Tribes. The hill people were the pre-eminent “people of the land” more often led by oracle priests and invulnerable warriors than by chiefs (Kaplan 1990a, 1990b, 1995). It is Mr Joske who describes practices such as “luveniwai,” an invulnerability ritual led by ritual officiants, and later “Tuka” practices offering immortality to its warrior adherents. Most importantly in Mr Joske’s era, the “Tuka” leader, a man called Mosese Dukumoi, also known as Navosavakadua, linked Fijian gods with Christian Old and New Testament versions of God (hence the biblical name of “Mosese”) to authorize his leadership of a new form of Fijian polity. Colonial texts such as Mr Joske’s administrative and ethnographic writings, reified Navosavakadua’s “Tuka movement,” as it became known and as they sought to suppress it, never recognizing its basis in the authority of people of the land. In this complex era, Navosavakadua was a Fijian lawgiver challenging new Christian, colonial, and coastal Fijian forms of order. He was, throughout, Mr Joske’s bête noire. In this chapter we will read Mr Joske’s texts as if looking over his shoulder, to envision aspects of the culture of the Fijians he describes, and we will also read them to get at the categories in the



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cosmology of an amiable imperialist. But there’s more to it still. Mr Joske’s texts don’t just express a world created full. They are the very way in which he made his world full. So, this is a story about Mr Joske’s life and writings that focuses on the making of a colonial self, where writing was a crucial activity.1 Mr Joske was in some ways a man in a world furnished by Kipling, but he was also a man seeking to set his place in that world by participating in its construction. He found, as we shall see, “good language” (Dening 1992) via Kipling that helped him to make his place in Victorian Fiji. Thus, we contrast Mr Joske’s agency on the periphery of the British Empire with that on the periphery of Fiji’s heroic history that Joske (as Brewster) so vividly (if sometimes opaquely) chronicled. Thereby we will understand a bit more about powers, specifically powers of agency, enabled by particular kinds of authorship with entailed forms of authority and position in British colonial culture. In this sense we can see Mr Joske’s life as a self-transformation from Jew to Roman, enacted through the imaging of otherness. And at the same time, if we are to use Mr Joske’s writing to look over his shoulder, then we can work to see more than he himself saw, we can work to see Sahlins’s “cultural forces in play.” Thus, this is a study that also thinks about how Mr Joske’s self-fashioning met a certain Fijian leader’s self-fashioning in the hills of Viti Levu. I have come to appreciate the ways in which Mr Joske’s “interests and biases are constitutive of what he is talking about” (Kirch and Sahlins 1992: 4). As his biography intersects with that of the Fijian prophet-leader Navosavakadua, the Victorian and Fijian cultural forces in play will generate a remade Mr Brewster, an enduringly famous Fijian prophet, and in the cultural conjunction between them, including relations and refractions of perception that contingently connect them, an ethnographic and historical reification of danger and disaffection in the hills of Viti Levu that will endure in Fijian experience, colonial law, and scholarly analysis.

Mr Joske’s World Created Full My first working title for this essay was “Mr Joske’s World Created Full.” I borrowed the term “world created full” from Michael Ryan (1981: 532) who tells us of sixteenth-century Europeans, encountering exotic others in the New World, who did not believe that they were discovering unknown lands and new cultures, but thought

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instead that they were confirming the existence of places and peoples already known from the Bible, existing in the Christian God’s world created full. In the case of A.B. Joske, it seemed to me that his texts situated Fiji in an empire already furnished. On the one hand, Mr Joske’s Fiji is often simply furnished by Kipling. Kipling is quoted for the first time (of dozens of citations in this work) on page 45 of The Hill Tribes, as Joske describes the flame-coloured flowering myrtle on the slopes of Mount Victoria, behind Nadarivatu, where he was stationed. “Their kindred grow, also in New Zealand, of which the omniscient Kipling sings in his Ballad of the Flowers … of the blood red myrtle-bloom.” “Never, to my knowledge,” Joske writes, “did the poet visit Fiji, yet the above is a perfect description.” However, it is not Kipling’s landscape that Joske uses most often, but rather Kipling’s characters and characterizations. And especially it is the Kipling of Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies that Joske brings to his writing of Fiji. Here Fiji is a place of rural customs, odd folk practices like “luveniwai” which intertwines spirits and people, layers of folk belief persisting under incoming governmental and religious transformations. Here he echoes the Kipling who wrote of a Britain constituted by waves of conquest, small dark folk succeeded by lighter larger conquerors, some of them Roman. This waves-of-conquest imagery resonates with nineteenth-century imaginations of the peopling of the Pacific. On the other hand, beyond Kipling, Mr Joske’s Fiji was furnished by touchstones and colonial tropes from other colonies, especially India. Thus, for example, the early chapters in The Hill Tribes recount the 1867 journey of the missionary Thomas Baker into the inland hills of Viti Levu, pursued and preceded by a whale’s tooth (“tabua”), a valuable sent by a chief who desired Baker’s death. Later, Joske writes of similar tabuas, sent out by Navosavakadua and his followers in the Tuka movement, to recruit allies. He compares them to the sinister chuppaties of the “Mutiny” in India in 1847. (A wider-ranging colonial story from India imagined communication and recruitment among plotting mutineers via chupatties [griddle baked breads], laid on doorsteps.2) Joske shared in a web of colonial interaction and images, from a globe of imperial interrelation brought to Fiji as well as developed there. In The King of the Cannibal Islands, he wrote: “The first night I used [the mosquito net] the comfort was so great that I could not sleep. I was not selfish or inhospitable, as I shared it with an old veteran of the Indian



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Mutiny (as it was large and roomy) and he kept me awake by yarns of his adventures in that great catastrophe” (Brewster 1937: 130). From Joske’s account of a shared mosquito net, we get a sense of one of the webs of connections and transmissions in Empire. Every colonial officer he names went on from Fiji to another colony. Every settler who came to Fiji had a history, and a connection to somewhere else. Of course written words moved around the globe (colonial correspondence, for example, or Joske’s own volumes), but a hodgepodge of individuals also personally created the connections, enabling a shared imagination to be made real. Certainly in Joske’s texts, Fijians are conflated with the British Empire’s other “others,” internal and external. They are likened to Scottish highlanders: in Hill Tribes one picture of eleven Fijian men is captioned “fijian armed native constabulary in sulu or kilts. The contingent at King Edward’s Coronation were for a few days with the Gordons at Aberdeen, whom they regarded as kai vata, or relations, on account of the kilt.” Perhaps it was the Fijians’ idea to see the similarities. On the other hand, the assimilation of Fijian hill tribes to Scottish highlanders pervades Joske’s work, and that of first colonial governor, Sir Arthur Gordon. Here these hill people are also like the characters described by Kipling: “The men only wore a strip of malo or bark cloth, passed between their legs and fastened round the waist like a sash. This get-up very much resembled that of the immortal [sic], ‘not very much before and rather less than half of that behind.’” (Brewster 1937: 25). I wish I could more fully reproduce the playfulness of Joske/Brewster, as we consider the seriousness of that playfulness and its purposes, effectiveness, and effects in Joske’s life, and in the lives of the hill peoples of Fiji. In this passage in Hill Tribes, Kipling’s fictional “native” is not identified as Kipling’s fiction – is it that he has such reality in the imperial world created full? Or is it that Joske is writing the Fijians as Kipling wrote Gunga Din?

Mr Joske and Mr Brewster: From Jew to Roman A quick chronology: Adolph Brewster Joske spent about forty years in Fiji. He was born in Melbourne, Australia. In 1870, at age sixteen, just returned to Melbourne from school in England he helped his father in his business (1937: 63), and then he came to Fiji with the

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first batch of settlers who founded Suva, later Fiji’s capital. Many of these initial white settlers hoped to plant cotton to replace supplies diminished during the American Civil War. They came under the aegis of the Polynesia Company of Melbourne, a joint stock company that “hoped to become a humble imitation of the Honourable East India Company” (18). The Polynesia Company had given Cakobau of Bau, later “King Cakobau” 10,000 pounds to pay off a debt demanded by the United States for damages to property of US citizens in Fiji by some of Cakobau’s subjects. In return, Cakobau gave the Polynesia Company a charter and promised them land in several parts of Fiji. Some of the land Cakobau promised he did not fully control, and he was not able to make good on some of these promises. Joske claimed several lots in Suva itself. Joske’s father, Paul Joske, arriving in Fiji in 1871, joined another merchant to establish the firm of Brewer and Joske. The firm “opened business as merchants and bankers, built a cotton-ginning mill and bought cotton in the seed from the planters, or shipped it on their account” (154). They also issued banknotes. In 1873 Paul Joske, whom his son describes as “a very vigorous, enterprising man,” built the first sugar mill in Fiji (86, 219). In 1884 A.B. Joske joined the Fiji Civil Service. He was Deputy Commandant of the Armed Native Constabulary, Assistant to Resident Commissioner Walter Carew, Stipendiary Magistrate, and later Resident Commissioner in Colo. He married in 1902. Joske retired from the Colonial Service in Fiji in 1910 and went to live in Torquay, England – he calls this his “return to England.” He died in late 1937 (The Times 1937: 16). Joske’s father was described by a later colonial officer, Philip Snow (1997: 84), as “a pioneering German Jewish merchant, Paul Joske.” Setariki Tuinaceva, late archivist of Fiji’s National Archives, once gossiped to me about A.B. Joske: “He was a Jew, you know” (personal communication, 1984). Joske’s books, published in his later years, give no hint of this affiliation. Here is how he introduces himself in The King of the Cannibal Isles: “Already some young Melbourne men had started [cotton] plantations in Fiji … I too was Melbourne born, and had just retuned from school in England, in my sixteenth year. My father, instead of sending me peremptorily to the Church of England Grammar School, where three of my brothers were, allowed me to try to help in his business, saying at the same time that, were I but of age, he would send me to Fiji to plant cotton. Oh how my spirit longed that that might come to pass” (1937: 63).



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In numerous passages, often with awkward narrative results, Joske links his family to Christian institutions and identifies himself as Christian. Often he does this by way of opposing self and other. In The Hill Tribes of Fiji he compares Fijian rituals for adolescent boys and the Jewish ritual of bar mitzvah, describing both as “somewhat equivalent to our confirmation” (1922: 177–8). In The King of the Cannibal Isles he tells an anecdote about a group of settlers “amongst them a member of the Semitic race” (1937: 191) who turned out to be fleeing a debt. Joske’s language “others” this man, in a complete and utter contrast to his later use of a cozy, white colonial “we.” Of course histories of Jews are full of intermarriages, assimilations, refusals, and denials. And by Jewish law, children inherit Jewishness through their mothers, not fathers. No matter how we look at it, Joske was not, in his own sense of self, a Jew. He shunned the connection. But because others in Fiji raised it, in what I am sure was often denigratory gossip, Joske worked to escape it. This escape can be charted in Joske’s colonial service, in his literal geographical movement, and in the tropes of minute papers and memoirs. In the course of his time in Fiji he moved from being a merchant and planter to being a colonial official, in the course of his life he moved from Melbourne, to Fiji, to retirement in Torquay. And in retirement, due perhaps to anti-German sentiment during the First World War, he changed his name from Joske to Brewster. In his lifetime, he worked very hard to transform himself from (perceived) Jew to Roman, from a merchant far from home, Germannamed and of uncertain, not top-drawer Australian background into an English-named official and chronicler of an imperial project: From a member of a class of whites who were destined to fail in a Fiji organized by an aristocratic colonial administration and the administration’s sugar-growing monopoly, to a member of the administration itself. From a man called “flabby” in aristocratic governor Sir Arthur Gordon’s first impression, as he summed up the Fiji whites and predicted their economic collapse, to a man who made colonial law real as he sat in a magistrate’s court, and who created almost indelible versions of Fiji’s history in his writings. From an off-white white (in the sense that Sander Gilman argues that in the European imagination class and “race” otherness have often been assimilated to each other, and to the ostensible physical otherness of Jews), to a pith helmet–wearing white, a Victorian imperial British white. None of this was possible without the mediation of otherness, the otherness of Fijian and Fiji Indian disorder.

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Gazing at Fijians Long before I started to think seriously about Mr Joske, I always used to wonder about the frontispiece photo to The Hill Tribes of Fiji. Why is the first picture in the book one of a Fisher Maiden, looking longingly out to sea for her lover? The Hill Tribes live inland. They can’t gaze out to sea. The logic of the picture comes not from Fijian ethnography but from British readers’ expectation: the portrayal of an unclothed “Native” woman at the beginning of the book. The colonial gaze is patriarchal, it’s here also commoditizing. Mr Joske didn’t take this picture. The photo credit is to J.H. Waters, Suva. It is one of what was clearly a set of carefully posed portraits of Fijian types. Another photo by J.H. Waters included in the book (there are several more) is of “A Cannibal Hill Warrior.” The posed pictures by J.H. Waters are much prettier than Mr Joske’s own grainy photos, and those by others such as Sir John Bates Thurston, also included scattered throughout the text. But what the out-of-place coastal fisher maiden reminds us is that The Hill Tribes is not simply the product of Mr Joske’s gaze on the Fijians. It is a gaze to be shared. There is an audience for the book in mind. It was an audience who shared a colonial literary world. They knew the immortal Gunga Din already, were charmed that Fijians should recognize kinship with Scottish highlanders, and were interested in unclothed fisher maidens, but in an ethnographic context. Writing to this audience Mr Joske offered authenticity of knowledge and a look over his shoulder. Inviting others to gaze with him, he could not himself be the object of scrutiny – though he could be the self-deprecating object of admiration as he muddled through. Thus, on a typical page from The Hill Tribes (note how Kipling, yarns from India, and Roman magistrates intermingle in a few artless paragraphs), Joske ruefully describes his official attempts to get Fijian women to feed their infants cow’s milk, in baby bottles (a pet scheme of one of Fiji’s governors): Whatever [the idiosyncrasy] was, the district officers had to play up to it, as Fiji used to be a Crown Colony of a severe type which meant that His Excellency was a bit of an autocrat and it was best for one to understand his bent, if possible. Incidentally, I would add, we were miserable failures over the feeding bottles. The women always declared they would never use them, and they



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didn’t. Kipling says somewhere that in India the people always say that all the sahibs are mad, only some are madder than others. That opinion is fully shared by the Fijians and I do not wonder at it … The Resident Commissioner [Joske’s superior, Walter Carew] used to remark that Cicero had said that magistrates ought to be men of leisure. Speaking for myself, life was one continual state of toil and emergency, and having to find instant remedies for every conceivable kind of contingency, reminding me of the Hindu railway official in charge of a lonely jungle who, finding a tiger on the premises one day, bolted himself into his office and telegraphed to headquarters: “Tiger on platform; please arrange.” There were always tigers about in my district, for which I had to arrange. (1922: 55) Some of Mr Joske’s imagery is engagingly self-deprecating, playfully challenging colonial autocrats, and sympathizing with Fijians. Some of it, however, is far more immediately disturbing, denying shared sympathy with Fijians, narrating a white observer of black peoples’ foibles, capacities, or crimes. This latter sort especially plays off of the deeper ethnic, racial, and temporal template. Like many other colonial narrators in Fiji, Joske tells the story of the transformation of Fijians with black souls to salvation and light through Christian conversion and its visible signs: the covering of nakedness, the shearing of hair. Last to be converted, well into the 1870s the dark putatively “Melanesian” peoples of the interior were to Joske, as well as to many other settlers and administrators, “fuzzy wuzzies” – among other epithets, until they accepted religion and the Queen’s Rule.

Excellent Cooks Most of Mr Joske’s work as magistrate was spent on cases arising among indentured Indians in Fiji – but most of his published writing is about Fijians. Like most other whites in the islands, he looked for and found his Pacific Romance among Fijians. In Fiji, in the late 1870s, concerned about decline in population, about keeping the peace, and about making the colony profitable, the first colonial governor instituted a form of customary law, that well predated the better-known forms of British colonial Indirect Rule

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designed in Africa in the early twentieth century. Under Sir Arthur Gordon’s system, a vast apparatus of rule through Native Administration was concerned with ordering and observing Fijians and codifying their custom. The Native Lands Commission surveyed lands, interviewed Fijians, and reserved 83 per cent of Fiji’s land for communal, inalienable Fijian possession. The remaining lands, and rented Native lands, were used for Fiji’s plantation sugar industry, eventually run by a single corporation chosen by the colonial administration. Rather than employing Fijians on the sugar plantations, Gordon, who had previously served as governor in Trinidad and Mauritius, instituted a system of indentured labour, with Indians from the British colony of India coming on contracts to cut sugar cane. Though a reader of Kipling and tales of Indian customs and culture, Joske, as colonial administrator, absorbed Fiji’s peculiar distinction: in Fiji, it was believed, Fijians had customs and customary law, whereas Indians were workers, bound by contract law. Later, Mr Joske (renamed on his title page as A.B. Brewster, Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute) is already among the scholars who (almost invariably) have focused only on Fijian society, history, and culture. This has always been what the audience for Fiji has wanted, whether present-day tourists or the curious, exotic-fancying buyers of Mr Joske’s books, with Fijian maiden frontispiece or titles promising tales of “cannibals.” When it comes to labour diaspora peoples, there is more in Joske’s books about the Pacific islanders who worked Fiji’s early plantations than about the Indian immigrants. They come up, most strikingly, as the solution to every cultured settler’s dilemma: how to get a good cook. Here I quote several passages from the total of five pages out of 302 in The Hill Tribes that discuss the indentured Indians: I had a great deal to do with assisting the Indian settlers in getting leases of native lands, many of which I pegged out myself. We used to have an ordinance which permitted of the magistrates marking out blocks of not more than ten acres on account of the scarcity of duly qualified surveyors. I had read all Meadows Taylor’s books [Taylor, a colonial administrator in India, was one of the chief chroniclers of Thuggee], and was deeply interested in Indian rural life. The new environ affected the religious observances of these immigrants, and tended to a general subversion of morals, making it more difficult to keep them in



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order. They ate all sorts of unlawful things, and did many things which were wrong according to their own ideas of morality. This was at first, before any of their own holy men appeared upon the scene; afterwards when some of them came along they insisted upon the due performance of worship and ancient custom and then matters improved … The last time I held court at Tavua on the northern sea coast, where these people were principally congregated … the whole of the free Indian settlers came to the Court House in gala dress bringing tea, biscuits, fruit, cigars, ginger beer, sweet-meats and all sorts of things which they presented to me, together with a plated tea and coffee service and a silver manicure set for my wife. I took it as a very great tribute of their affection as I was leaving them for good, and they could have no hope of any favour from me in return. Subsequently Indian lawyers and agitators arrived and stirred up sedition and discontent. By their machinations a Commission was sent down from India to inquire as to the condition of their people in Fiji. It was composed, I believe, mostly of the class who are so arrogantly demanding equal status throughout the Empire, and they reported adversely and recommended that immigration in Fiji be stopped. It was a most unjust decision, as nowhere were Indians more fairly treated. After that some of Gandhi’s adherents appeared upon the scene and there were riots and strikes which were suppressed mainly by the loyalty of the Fijians who everywhere volunteered as special constables [and broke strikes by replacing Indian workers] … In justice to a great many of the Indians it should be added that the extremists coerced them into joining the strikes by threats of death. Many of them, especially the domestic servants, were deeply attached to their masters and mistresses and although they complied outwardly in the day time with the leaders’ orders, at night they returned to perform the household duties. Many of my friends have had Indians in their employ for nearly twenty years, and those of us who go back to the scene of our labours are generally looked up by their old servants, who ask to be taken on again. My own cook was with me for thirteen years, and I left him established upon a small farm. Now, alas! he has gone the way of all flesh, but all who visited Nadarivatu will remember the faithful Ferdinand and his great culinary skill. (1922: 299–302)

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If the real diasporic Indians aren’t much there in Mr Joske’s texts, India is, as a deep well of touchstones for his own colonial experience. Well furnished by Kipling, Joske’s Fiji drew on the tales of sinister Mutiny he heard when newly arrived in Fiji, sharing the mosquito net with the old India hand. Reading Meadows Taylor he absorbed the colonial legends of Thuggee. From Kipling he got more charming and malleable understandings: the Fijians are loyal, amusingly attired like Gunga Din; the Indians he would like to remember pay him tribute, give him tea sets, and are faithful cooks forever. But from that early imperial sharing under the mosquito net with its tales of the mutiny, Joske never loses his simultaneous fear of threats to his lawgiving order: Indian lawyers – presumptuous counterlawgivers – who arrive to threaten and negate the affectionate tea set, bringing sedition and discontent (legally proscribed as “disaffection” in colonial Fiji’s law). The woodland sprites of luveniwai and silver tea sets share a space with darker touchstones of disorder: compatriots of the tea-set givers seek to “arrogantly demand equal status throughout Empire” (1922: 300), luveniwai gives way to Tuka, with its sinister whale’s teeth which recollect the chupatties of the mutiny and its Fijian leader who styles himself a lawgiver.

Being Roman It is in this context that we can read Mr Joske’s account of the appearance of Mosese Dukumoi, also known as Navosavakadua, leader in the 1880s of the political-religious Tuka movement. (Navosavakadua means “the only voice” or “he who speaks once and is effective” – the same term, Joske noted, was used by Fijians to refer to the colonial Supreme Court justice.) Navosavakadua’s self-fashioning as a lawgiver addressed coastal chiefs’ presumptions, missionaries’ claims, and the lawgiving projects of hinterland colonial figures like Mr Joske. He gathered together adherents from “Twelve Tribes” at an inland pilgrimage place, organizing both a movement and a political form that was creative, syncretic, and tremendously threatening to the Fijian colonial order. Mr Joske was viscerally affected by Navosavakadua: “He was certainly not much to look at,” he wrote, “being very black and of a decidedly Melanesian type. He looked bilious and overfed, and had a dazed far-away look as if he was continually under the influence



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of narcotics” (1922: 244). Arrested and tried as a Dangerous and Disaffected Native, under new regulations passed primarily to control the hill people, Navosavakadua would be deported to Rotuma, and his kin to the island of Kadavu, home of Fijians “strongly impregnated with Polynesian blood and consequently light-skinned, good looking, and inclined to gaiety” (229), Joske wrote. Elsewhere he links their Polynesian bodily admixture to a resistance to Navosavakadua’s doctrines. Gazing at Navosavakadua – “I went over to attend the Court, not as a judicial officer, but to watch the case from my special knowledge of Tuka” (225) – Joske became an authority. Disciplining Tuka followers and other wrongdoers, he organized a crew of hill-tribe prisoners to cut roads in the hill country, and called them his “Lost Legion.” He thus became a Roman. Joske’s understanding of Rome arrives via British novelists and poets. He quotes Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome composed when Macaulay was a colonial administrator in India. He alludes to Kipling’s romantic portrayals of the Lost Legion. Whether it is Kipling, or others, the metaphors and the relationships were in many cases already drawn for him. What Kipling gave him, specially, was the “good language” (cf. Greg Dening (1992), on “Mr Bligh’s Bad Language”) to become a self-styled Roman. In chronicling the failure of Captain Bligh to win the respect of his men, Dening traced perceptively this failure to gain their full acceptance of his leadership. The rare British sea officer who rose from the ranks of common seamen (due to his superior skills when actually at sea), Bligh was resented for his command and discipline, especially when the Bounty was under great material stress, as we know from the facts of the actual historic mutiny against Bligh. What Dening shows, though, is that the legend of Bligh as harsh disciplinarian is belied by the ship records which detail rates of flogging and other acts of discipline and punishment lower than the British naval averages. Dening argues that in crisis, it was class prejudice, Bligh’s inability to be the gentleman, master, and therefore commander, that enabled deprivation and jeopardy to generate mutinous resistance to unpopular commands. Thus, we see exactly where Joske found his gentlemanly language and voice, in the well-loved Kiplings of Empire, and exactly what he did with it; he become A.B. Brewster. (Only people as informed as late Fiji archivist Mr Setariki Tuinaceva could later be skeptical, as when he joked, “Did that make him Adolph Brewster Brewster?”)

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From Hinterland Disaffection to Folk Practices As Mr Joske became Mr Brewster, Fiji was moving from a site of colonial pacification to a routinized colony. Bodies were crucial to the colonial body politic in Fiji. Heterogeneity, of colonizers and the colonized, meant that these bodies were relative, polysemic, and always reviewed in hierarchical contexts. Most interesting about the transforming personae of Mr Joske into Mr Brewster is the change in his tone concerning hinterland Tuka bodies and the body politic. The change is from his sober minute papers from the late 1800s warning of warriors with blackened faces crossing provincial borders, to later cozy comparisons of Fijian deities with woodland sprites. In the 1880s, in Stipendiary Magistrate Joske’s reports, invulnerability rites were made illegal, their practitioners monitored. Colonial inquiry included the question “what is the evil in the practice?” Statutes against Disaffected and Dangerous Natives were put into effect. But in the 1920s, in Mr Brewster’s memoirs published from afar (Torquay) there was no need to ask “what was the evil?” Mr Brewster’s audience knew already, but found it more diverting than dangerous.

Lawgiving, the Hill Tribes of Fiji, and “the Cultural Forces in Play” During oral history interviews about nineteenth-century leader Mosese Dukumoi, who was called Navosavakadua, and his Tuka movement, with Navosavakadua’s and his followers’ descendants, in Ra in the 1980s and 1990s, I occasionally asked people if they had heard of Mr Joske who commanded the Armed Native Constabulary at Nadarivatu in the 1880s and who had such an active role in investigating and arresting Navosavakadua and his followers. I never met anyone who had tales of Joske/Brewster. They did remember and narrate the experience of the consequences of his findings of “danger and disaffection”: arrests and deportations. Navosavakadua was deported to Rotuma, many of his relatives and followers to Kadavu. Most important to Vatukaloko people, however, was the story of their ancestor oracle priest Navosavakadua, his vision, and his leadership (Kaplan 1995; and see Kaplan 2005, 2007). In that history, we can see how the projects and plans of hill-tribe Fijians did much to shape Mr Joske.



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In 1874 Mr Joske could not have been the governor of colonial Fiji. That kind of post went first to more aristocratic appointees, like Sir Arthur Gordon. But he got work when the colonial project put its signs and systems at risk, as Sahlins would argue, in its ramifying effort to enfold Fijian history into itself. When the new colony met challenges and unrest from the hill people, and complexities in its engagement with Fijian modes of social order emerged (as when coastal high chiefs proved unable to pacify the highlands), Gordon looked to old Fiji hands to manage the people of the interior. Joske’s colonial employment began as Walter Carew’s second in command as resident commissioner in Colo East (Brewster 1922: 47ff). As we have seen, the Colo provinces, in the interior of Fiji’s biggest island, were historically less hierarchical polities than their Eastern coastal neighbours. Eastern coastal chiefs claimed sovereignty over some of the interior and hinterland peoples, and ritual and political struggles ensued. While Eastern coastal chiefs made their ritual and political power as dangerous foreigners, or synthetic descendants of chief-strangers and the women of the land (Sahlins 1985a), some interior peoples, such as the Vatukaloko, led by Navosavakadua, traced their autonomy to a ritual priority rooted in descent from gods of the land, from the interior Kauvadra Range. Certain of the inland people refused to follow King Cakobau, coastal chiefs, and people into Christianity in 1854, denied access to coastal labour recruiters in service of white planters, and did not acknowledge Cession to the Queen in 1874 (Kaplan 1989a, 1989b, 1990a, 1990b, 1995). After a military campaign against the interior people, Gordon authorized the hinterland station at Nadarivatu with its small corps of Armed Native Constabulary where Mr Joske spent much of his early colonial career. Because of this history, and unlike the coastal and island provinces, headed by Fijian administrators, Governor Gordon decided that the interior provinces were to be headed by white resident commissioners (1922: 47). Joske’s opportunity, to remake himself as a Roman began in the midst of these “cultural forces in play” in the colonial intersection with a deeper Fijian history, in an opposition between coastal kingdoms and interior peoples. Joske’s propensity for writing himself as not-Fijian took shape as well, as he saw coastal, Christian Fijians distinguish themselves from the unshorn heathen “big heads,” the Tuka adherents and followers of Navosavakadua, of the interior. Like Methodist missionary chroniclers of Fiji, he lauded Christian chiefs and deplored

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superstitious warrior priests of the hills. In these conjunctures, an enduring history as “disaffected” was created for the hill tribes, a history that has been both a limit and a resource. Lawgiving is a key aspect of the self-fashioning of Navosavakadua, leader of the movement against Christianity, colonialism, and their Fijian coastal allies. Colonial reports (Mr Joske’s among them) called him the leader of the Tuka movement, and denigrated it as heathen, superstition, and backsliding. They saw him as leader of a disaffected crowd, not subjects of a constituted, orderly Fijian or colonial polity. But Navosavakadua seems to have sought to constitute his own, new form of polity. Its authority drew on the leadership of oracle priests, not chiefs, and on hybrid deities, not the colonial established church. Self-named as Moses, he organized leadership, boundaries, and ritual practice for his followers. In the twentieth century his descendants and the descendants of his followers refashioned him as a Moses whose legacy and memory shaped their journey out of exile and punishment into return to lands at the foot of the Kauvadra Mountain Range (see Kaplan 1995). Thinking about Mr Joske turning himself from Jew to Roman brings to mind other British imperial figures who imagined themselves Roman, such as Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), who wrote The Lays of Ancient Rome while serving as legal member of the Supreme Council of India, 1834–1838. Of even more interest is Sir William Jones (1746–1794), who in India set himself as a codifier of Indian law. As Bernard Cohn (1987) shows, Jones saw himself as a Roman, a lawgiver, who “gave” the Indians the (“their”) Laws of Manu. Of course Jones began his lawgiving career secure in his sense of self as a Roman, “Sir” William Jones, a classical scholar and barrister educated at Oxford. But I do not raise Macaulay or Jones to think of Joske as a participant in a unified colonial discourse. Considering the turn of anthropology to history, we learn much from the consideration of British culture in the making of British colonial power. We could not understand Mr Joske if we did not reflect on how forms of knowledge are modalities of power. However, we end here asking different questions about this complex colonial engagement. In our case, pondering Joske becoming Brewster, we could still argue from a unified model of a general British colonial culture (and borrow the image from Merleau-Ponty adopted by LéviStrauss, the idea that the landscape thinks through the painter, the myth through the person; in this sense, still, the British discourses



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are after all thinking through and transforming Joske). On the path blazed by Sahlins, however, we can pursue not only the cultural dimensions of colonial power and its impact on and via knowledge, but also the powers in culture. The history of Joske’s agency is both informed by colonial culture and in a charmingly manipulated way, a deliberate extension and motivated refashioning of it. It is not merely that Joske becomes an author. Just as Sahlins argues that history explodes the diversity of culture structures, so too authorships and their forms of authority merit fine-grained attention to their distinctions, powers, and consequences. Joske did not become an author in general, he became the Kipling of Fiji for its imperial audience and therefore a Kipling for Fiji’s future. Thus, we come full circle to Sahlins’s points about primary sources quoted at the outset. The point is not that Joske pretended to be a Kipling and was therefore biased in his tales of Fijians. The point is that he was, after all, startlingly empowered as both a significant actor in the events he related, and was (unlike Bligh) able to fully embrace and use the relevant literary tools and values. Thus, he really did become the British, Roman, Brewster. By his ability to authoritatively rework and extend imperial patterns of description and understanding, Joske made himself into the British kind of Roman, as he codified, in The Hill Tribes, the customary ways of the “Native” people. And he did not have to do this, though he certainly helped the empire make sense of the Fijian hinterland in its own particular way. Most soberly his description had obvious, enduring costs, especially for Navosavakadua and his followers. It could have been otherwise. Mr Joske (and for that matter Sir William Jones) could have found a cherished image of lawgiving in the figure of a Jew – Moses. But Mr Joske had met Moses (Mosese Dukumoi, aka Navosavakadua) and decided that he would rather be a Roman.

Notes 1 A conference paper by historian Arthur Williamson on Roman and Old Testament imagery in colonial discourse sparked my reading of Joske’s many references to Rome. Williamson argues that the imperial British (and some in the empire, notably certain Scottish elites) thought of empire as Roman – and see also Betts (1971) on “The Allusion to Rome in British Imperialist Thought of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth

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Centuries” – a point long made by Bernard Cohn, for example, in relation to Sir William Jones. From reading Williamson I also began to think about the ways that Jews figured as another category in the imagings of power and difference in empire – though I think that the Jew Mr Joske feared to be is very different from the Jews the Scottish elites imagined and hoped to evangelize. 2 See Kaye (1966), Sen (1957), Guha (1983), Arnold (1993), and Bhabha (1994) for influential accounts of these chappaties. They variously argue about comparison with Scottish burning crosses, about protonationalism, about plague warnings as the British army was an inadvertent choleraspreading vector (Arnold 1993), and about the anxiety from uncertainty of the meanings represented by the chappaties as itself constitutive of the uncanny circulation (Bhabha 1994). And see, most recently, Manan Ahmed’s excellent and influential blog Chapati Mystery (http://www.chapatimystery.com/about).

5 Supplement to Marshall Sahlins’s Voyage Around the Islands of History (Tahiti 1768, Samoa 1787) Serge Tcherkézoff The focus of this contribution1 is the apparent sexual offers that Polynesian women made to the first Europeans who arrived in Polynesia. If we go back to some journals written during the early voyages, which have still not been studied in as much detail as they deserve, we discover an unexpected aspect of these apparent sexual offers: the “girls’ very young” age and their “weeping.” This leads us toward a hypothesis. Many Polynesian sources attest that young girls who entered into marriage with a high chief had to be virgins (or at least girls who had not given birth).2 Other myths describe how young virgins would get pregnant by sitting nude in front of the rays of the rising sun.3 In the ritual dances, the first row was reserved for these young virgins.4 What was the special significance of virginity in all of these cases? The answer could well lie in the dialogue that Captain Bligh held with a number of Tahitians in 1789. He relates that he had numerous conversations with the “Queen” and with other “principal” people. Among other subjects, he made a “long enquiry,” he says, about a belief that the “Queen” would have her first child “through the inspiration of the Eatua” (atua, the god): “The Queen, whoever she is, has her first Born Son, or the one that becomes the Heir to the Crown, through the inspiration of the Eatua. Nay more than that, they assert that while the Woman is asleep and the Husband by her, the Eatua hovers over her, and literally explaining their expression, says he has connection with her & she conceives, but that all the

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other children are begot by the Husband” (Bligh 1789, quoted in Oliver 1974: 442). A partial confirmation of this is to be found in Teuira Henry’s reconstruction of the rites surrounding birth “when a queen was about to be delivered of her first child, called the matahiapo.” The songs chanted by those in attendance praise “the cord of the child, the sacred cord of the god that has flown hither.”5 James Morrison, who lived in Tahiti from 1789 to 1791, explains that the high chief of the time (Pomare II) had a divine father: “His Mother declaring that the Deity (Taane) Cohabited with her in her Sleep and, proving Pregnant soon after, the Child was declared to be the offspring of the Deity and is rever’d as something supernatural” (Oliver 1974: 774). My contention is that, at the initiative of the chiefs and priests-orators, the total cosmological framework, the mythical structure, and the underpinning of the Polynesian idea and practice of “theogamy” was transposed without modification onto the scene of the encounters with Europeans. These Europeans were considered envoys from the realm of these sources of fecundity, this cosmology demanding the presence of a female agent who had not yet given birth. This contention is based on a range of enquiries over a number of years. I happen to have been doing fieldwork in Samoa from early 1981, focusing on social and political organization. Rather unexpectedly, this led me to tackle gender issues, since the political structure strongly showed a deep contrast between a whole set of relations centred around the brother-sister pair and another set centred around the husband-wife pair. Thus, I was led to enquire into “men/women” relations in general, including representations of sexuality (Tcherkézoff 1993, 2003a). When the “Mead-Freeman debate” began in 1983, and Derek Freeman himself came to Samoa to give several presentations, I felt that the arguments vividly exchanged all failed to give accurate consideration to the beginning of the European myth-making of “Polynesian sexuality.” I gradually undertook a close reading of early sources regarding Samoa (Tcherkézoff 2004a). As I discovered that the sources, when read in their entirety and not only through secondary quotations of sentences taken out of their initial context (the journals of the first European visits), presented a very different picture, I began to ask how the Samoan context could have been so different from the Tahitian one as



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“described” by the same early visitors? I found myself delving into the sources relating to early visits in Tahiti, only to find that much of the established “knowledge” about early Tahiti was largely misconstrued (Tcherkézoff 2004b). When revised, both cases were very similar, despite the fact they came from opposite ends of Polynesia and had little contact with each other. I then thought that some generalization about early European visits in Polynesia could be offered for discussion.6 I finalized this essay in 2006, when Alex Golub came up with the idea of a Festschrift for Marshall Sahlins. It was twenty-five years after a certain lecture given by the same Marshall Sahlins. In Paris, in a lecture given at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in 1981, Marshall Sahlins, while addressing the question of Captain Cook’s fate in Hawai‘i, raised a point that was to change the view on these first sexual encounters. He hypothesized that, in the Hawaiian case, contrary to what these early voyagers had thought, it was not “sexual hospitality” offered to male travellers. Rather, said Sahlins, it was a transposition of a mythical and social schema: “theogamy,” marriage with creatures considered to be envoys of the gods, as partial images of these gods. The aim was to produce powerful children and to secure new kinds of powers. Sahlins found a first expression of this hypothesis in Diderot’s famous Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage Around the World customs (1964 [1796]), presented as a dialogue between a Tahitian elder and a European priest,7 and he thus entitled his 1981 lecture “Supplement to Captain Cook’s Voyage,” published later as chapter 1 of his Islands of History (1985a).8 That very year, 1981, as a freshly incorporated member of the EHESS, I was on my way for the first time to the Samoan islands, instructed by Daniel de Coppet to read carefully Sahlins’s Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island (1962a) as a masterful example of Pacific ethnography. A few years later, a team of the EHESS translated and in 1989 its press published Des Îles dans l’Histoire (Islands of History), a copy of which also made its way to Samoa several times in my bag. These conjunctions of sailing routes prompt me to offer here to Marshall, in homage to his pioneering views of 1981, my own tiny “supplement.” Indeed, a further enquiry into the mythical and social scheme of this “theogamy” can now be opened, at least for other parts of Polynesia. Why, in Samoa and in Tahiti,9 did the females who were presented to the first European male visitors have to be so young? Why were they weeping?

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Western “Knowledge” about Pre-Christian Samoan and Tahitian “Customs” Relating to Adolescence and Marriage The very first Europeans to set foot on Samoan soil were French – the officers and crew of Lapérouse’s expedition, and the encounter lasted only two days (10 and 11 December 1787). The report describing the behaviour of the inhabitants insisted on two aspects. The Samoan men were “ferocious barbarians” (because of the fight during the second day, where a dozen of the French – but some 30 Samoans who are hardly ever mentioned – died) (Tcherkézoff 2004a: chapter 4). The women, on the other hand, gained the admiring approval of the French visitors. Even after the “massacre,” Lapérouse noted, “Among a fairly large number of women I noticed two or three who were very pretty and who [one] could have thought had served as a model for the charming drawing of the Present Bearer of Cook’s third voyage,10 their hair was adorned with flowers … their eyes, their features, their movement spoke of gentleness whereas those of the men depicted ferocity and surprise. In any one sculptor[’s] study the latter would have been taken for Hercules and the young women for Diana, or her nymphs” (Dunmore, who translated and edited Lapérouse, 1995: 412–13). Lapérouse’s bias in favour of the women is explained by the sexual encounters that occurred during the stay and to which the French captain refers in his conclusion on the “customs” of the Samoans: “Whatever navigators who preceded us might say, I am convinced that at least in the Navigators Islands girls are mistresses of their own favours before marriage, their complaisance casts no dishonour on them, and it is more likely that when they marry they are under no obligation to account for their past behaviour. But I have no doubt that they are required to show more restraint when they are married” (Dunmore 1995: 420). After a mere two days of encounters on land, Lapérouse, without being able to understand a single word of the local language, had formed an opinion about the Samoan customs governing adolescence and marriage! Of course, he had already certain preconceptions of the ways of the “Indians” in that part of the Pacific, through his reading of Bougainville’s and Cook’s accounts of Tahiti and neighbouring islands. A careful reading of the succession of events described in Lapérouse’s journal (Tcherkézoff 2004a: 28–67) reveals the only scenes that Lapérouse’s officers could have seen and participated



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in: one or two “visits” to a village during which some of the French were taken inside a house where they were asked to have intercourse with a young girl. Limited as his experience of Samoan culture was, Lapérouse’s opinion – condensed in this single sentence that abruptly summarizes the upbringing and the rules of behaviour applying to Samoan girls – became an accepted part of Western anthropological “knowledge” about Polynesia. A century and a half later, in a vast compilation of Polynesian customs, which developed into several treatises and standard works of reference for any student of Polynesia, Williamson (1924, 1933, 1939), who had been instructed by Seligman to gather all the information available on this part of the Pacific, quoted that same sentence (from the 1797 publication of Lapérouse’s journal) in order to characterize the absence of “chastity” in pre-Christian Samoa (Williamson 1939: 156). And then, in the 1980s, when the heated debate initiated by Freeman (1983) focused on Mead’s 1926 fieldwork dealing with Samoan adolescence and her conclusions in Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead 1928; Tcherkézoff 2001a, 2001b, 2001c), one of the champions of Mead’s views called on Lapérouse as a witness: Williamson (1939/1975) carried out an extensive review of all of the early accounts of Polynesian cultures … With respect to premarital sex in general, he said that in Samoa: “According to Turner and Brown [early missionaries], chastity … was more a name than a reality … Lapérouse tells us that girls were, before marriage, ‘mistresses of their own favors, and their complaisance did not dishonor them’ (p. 156)” … From these many accounts, there can be little doubt that sexual behavior in Samoa before it was Christianized was more casual for virtually everyone, including young females. The denial of this by Freeman and some contemporary Samoans can be understood in terms of the concerted efforts of missionaries and the local pastors to create, and then maintain, a hegemony of Victorian sexual values and practices. (Côté 1994: 80–2) Twenty years earlier, in Tahiti, very similar scenes had been played out, and these were similarly absorbed into what were to become the Western canons about “Polynesian” customs. On only the second or third day of their Tahitian visit (7 or 8 April 1768), a small group of French officers (we can identify three of them from the

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journals) told their Captain, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, that they had been sexually “offered” a “young girl” in the chiefly household that they had visited. Bougainville recorded this in his journal, and in his book of 1771, famous throughout Europe, he abusively generalized: “several Frenchmen” had told him what kind of “hospitality” they had enjoyed, “in the custom of this island”; indeed, “we are offered all the young girls” (Bougainville 1966 [1771]: 194–5; Dunmore, who edited and translated Bougainville, 2002: 63). He later reflected upon this extraordinary society which had clearly remained as it was in Eden, untouched and spared the consequences of the Fall: Tahitian girls were “as was Eve before her sin” (as his companion Fesche expressed it, in Dunmore 2002: 257). We must note that Bougainville, even if he generalized instead of quoting the exact narratives of his companions (as can be seen when reading the events described in his companions’ journals), spoke of “the young girls” offered. A close study of the journals written by the members of Bougainville’s expedition (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 114–239) shows how the Frenchmen immediately imagined that this kind of behaviour had always been the local “custom” among Tahitians. The Frenchmen, like many early European visitors to the Polynesian islands, could not imagine that they were perceived as not-entirely-human creatures and even as envoys from the realm of the gods. They thought that they were received merely as voyagers to whom “hospitality” was offered. The Frenchmen had no conception that the way in which the girls behaved toward them was extraordinary. They were also blind – and how strange this seems given the scenes they were witnessing – to the fact that the girls were forcibly presented to them by adults. They were apparently deeply convinced that, among people who had remained in a “state of nature,” females engaging in sexual acts were only following the impulses of their “female nature.”11 And that here in this society they were “free” to follow those impulses.

Samoan Facts: The Scene Observed by Lapérouse Lapérouse’s narrative gives us some clues about the scenes in which the Samoan girls made the French believe that they were “mistresses of their own favours.” In the conclusion to his narrative, Lapérouse adds a passage which, given his typically cautious style, he was clearly hesitant about including in his official journal:



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As the story of our voyage can add a few pages to that of mankind I will not omit pictures that might shock in any other kind of book and I shall mention that the very small number of young and pretty island girls I referred to soon attracted the attention of a few Frenchmen who in spite of my orders endeavoured to establish links of intimacy with them; since our Frenchmen’s eyes revealed their desires they were soon discovered; some old women negotiated the transaction, an altar was set up in the most prominent hut, all the blinds were lowered, inquisitive spectators were driven off; the victim was placed within the arms of an old man who exhorted her to moderate her sorrow for she was weeping (qui l’exortoit à moderer sa douleur,12 car elle pleuroit); the matrons sang and howled during the ceremony, and the sacrifice was consummated in the presence of the women and the old man was acting as altar and priest. All the village’s women and children were around and outside the house, lightly raising the blinds and seeking the slightest gaps between the mats to enjoy this spectacle. Whatever navigators who preceded us might say, I am convinced that at least in the Navigators Islands girls are mistresses of their own favours before marriage, their complaisance casts no dishonour on them. (Dunmore 1995: 419–20) If the last sentence – which unerringly made its way into the twentieth-century literature as we have seen – is a typical example of European overinterpretation and overgeneralization, the preceding lines tell us what Lapérouse actually saw or at least what he had been told by some of his officers. In Lapérouse’s entire narrative of his stay in the Samoan archipelago, the only actual description he gives of a sexual act is this “sacrifice” in the “prominent hut.” Let us keep in mind a few points. This incident concerned only a “very small number of young … girls I referred to.” The “victims” were only “girls.” Each girl was “weeping.” She was apparently held by the orator during the “operation,” since this “old man” is said by Lapérouse to have himself been the “altar” on which the “sacrifice” was performed. She was presented in “the most prominent hut,” which seems to indicate a high stone base, which identifies the hut as the house of the main chief. All the blinds were lowered, and the women “sang and howled.” What Lapérouse describes corresponds to the enactment of a nineteenth-century Samoan marriage ceremony where the young bride was a virgin and was ceremonially deflowered. We can find

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in the narratives of the 1830s–50s the same spatial and temporal disposition. Even Lapérouse’s reference to the “matrons singing and howling” corresponds to what William T. Pritchard observed in the 1850s (Tcherkézoff 2003a: 350–70). Lapérouse’s remark that “all the blinds were lowered” is also very important. There were only two cases where an activity would be conducted inside a house with all the blinds lowered. One was a defloration ceremony. The other was a “meeting with the spirits” (fono ma aitu) when chiefs of the village, faced with making an important and difficult decision, and needing some superhuman inspiration, met at night and silently (Tcherkézoff 2004a: chapter 3). Let us now move to Tahiti and the events of almost twenty years before.

Tahitian Facts: The Scenes of 7–9 April (according to Nassau and Fesche) Nassau, 7 April 1768 When we compare the French journals and examine the dates of daily entries we find that the first “offering of girls” reported to Bougainville by his men occurred on 7 April, the first full day the French spent on land. The Prince of Nassau, who had been with Chevalier d’Oraison, tells us that they were “keen to call on their chief”: “When I arrived at his home, they served us fruit, then the women offered me a young girl. The Indians surrounded me and each was eager to share with his eyes in the pleasure I was about to enjoy. The young girl was very pretty but European preconceptions require more mystery. An Indian used very singular means to further excite my desires. Happy nation that does not yet know the odious names of shame and scandal” (Nassau, in Dunmore 2002: 283). We can note that a presentation, understood by the French as an “offering” (of a sexual gift), was made as soon as the French came on land. The adults were so keen for Nassau, as the apparent leader of the group, to be able to act his part that they tried to get him “excited” in a “very singular” way (of which we are told nothing more). Was this merely a matter of sexual “hospitality” staged by the dominant males of the place for their visitors – with women fully participating (by bringing in the girl?). The French assumed that it was, but they were blind to the exercise of masculine power since, for them, these scenes only showed how in Tahitian society “women” were generally “free” to “follow their natural drives” (see quotations



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in Tcherkézoff 2004b: 169–72, 202–7, 223–39). But, even given the gendered complexities of the “offer,” a gift of sexual hospitality would surely not have involved rushing upon the new arrivals in this manner, and trying to force them into accepting their offers. Nassau reported that, in the chief’s house he visited, the “young girl” was “offered,” and that this offer was made by “the women.” He does not say that the women offered their own favours. Nassau also tells us that there was a crowd who “surrounded” him and the girl. This gave the French to believe, as they noted in their journals, and Bougainville in his official voyage account, that “Tahitian custom” required, or at least allowed the performance of the sexual act to occur “publicly,” and even made of it a “public festival.” The French would continue to interpret any event involving their own presence in terms of the imagined everyday practices of Tahitian life. They did not for a moment suppose that all of this might be quite exceptional or, at least, occasioned specifically by families ceremonially giving their young daughters in marriage to powerful strangers imagined to be akin to sacred high chiefs. Fesche on 7 April Together in the chief’s house with Nassau and Chevalier d’Oraison was the young adventurer Fesche, who had volunteered to join Bougainville’s voyage of circumnavigation: There were three of us, we go off with the intent of taking a walk escorted by a group of islanders, we arrive at a hut where we are welcomed by the master of the house, he firstly shows us his possessions, making us understand that he was waiting for his wives who were due to arrive shortly. We go together, he shows us the tree the bark of which is used to make the loincloths they wear as their clothing and tells us the names of all that country’s fruits. After some time spent strolling, we returned to his home where we found his wife and young girl aged 12 or 13. We are made to sit, they bring us coconuts and bananas, we are invited to eat, we conform to their wishes. We then see each one of them pick up a green branch13 and sit in a circle around us, one of those present took a flute from which he drew pleasant soft sounds and they brought a mat that they laid out on the open space and on which the young girl sat down. All the Indians’ gestures made us clearly understand what this was about, however this practice being so contrary to

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those established for us and wanting to be sure of it, one of us [Nassau14] goes up to the offered victim, makes her the gift of an artificial pearl that he attaches to her ear, and ventures a kiss, which was well returned. A bold hand led by love slips down to two new-born apples (deux pommes naissantes) rivals of each other and worthy like those of Helen to serve as models for cups that would be incomparable for their beauty and the attraction of their shape. The hand soon slipped and by a fortunate effect of chance, fell on charms still hidden by one of their cloths, it was promptly removed by the girl herself whom we saw then dressed as Eve was before her sin. She did more, she stretched out on the mat, struck the chest of the aggressor, making him understand that she was giving herself to him and drew aside those two obstacles that defend the entrance to that temple where so many men make a daily sacrifice. The summons was very appealing and the athlete caressing her was too skilled in the art of fencing not to take her right away had not the presence of the surrounding 50 Indians, through the effect of our prejudices, put the brake on his fierce desires. (Fesche, in Dunmore 2002: 257) It should be noted that the girl was presented wearing a “loincloth,” that is barkcloth, which shows that she had been intentionally dressed for a ceremony. (If she had just come from work in the garden, she would have had on a belt of leaves.) We can judge the girl’s youth from the expression used to describe her breasts, together with Fesche’s own assessment that she was “aged 12 or 13.” And if, as Fesche says at the beginning, the man went to look for his “wives,” it was only the young girl who was offered. If we are to believe Nassau and Fesche, the role of the “women” was in fact to tell the girl what she had to do (Nassau: “the women offered me a young girl”) and, by means of gestures, together with the other adults, to make the French understand what was involved (Fesche: “All the Indians’ gestures made us clearly understand what this was about”).

“Tahitian Marriages” (Fesche) Fesche, the only observer to give us specific details about the first sexual presentation of a young girl, also provides us with a summary



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that either takes this scene up again, adding a number of points, or combines it with other similar scenes at which he had been present or that other men had described to him. Indeed, Fesche prides himself on describing “their marriages” for us. Like the rest of the French visitors, he of course knows nothing about how Tahitians might have conceived such marriages, the French only having stayed for ten days. At least, he admits straight away that he is only hypothesizing. What is interesting for us is that he admits that he is relying only on the sexual offerings made to the French (see his text below). For that reason, we need to pay his account some attention. It is not an imaginary tale about Tahitian marriages but the presentation of points in common between the several scenes of sexual presentation that were enacted for the benefit of the French. The description provides an important piece of information that I shall comment upon in a later section, namely, the performance of an “operation” that made the young girl “cry.” But first of all let us note two aspects, namely, that the Tahitians tried to force the French to take action and that the girl was still young and was “brought forward” by the adults. The Tahitian adults were surely following a definite strategy. Fesche’s Text Their marriages are, I believe, made in public. I make this supposition on the basis of what happened to possibly two-thirds of the Frenchmen: the fathers and mothers who brought their girls (amenaient leurs filles), presented them to the one who pleased them, and urged them to consummate the task of marriage with them (consommer l’oeuvre de mariage avec elle). The girl (la fille) struck the chest of the one to whom she was being offered, uttered a few words that expressed, from the meaning we have attributed to them,15 the surrender she was making of herself, lay down on the ground and removed her clothing. Several made a fuss when it came to the point (Plusieurs faisaient des façons quand il s’agissait d’en venir au fait), however they allowed themselves to be persuaded. During the operation (Durant l’opération), the islanders assisting [with the operation], always present in large numbers, made a circle around them, holding a green branch, sometimes they threw one of their cloths over the actor, as in

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Cythera they covered the happy lovers with greenery. If one of them happened to have a flute, he would play it, others accompanied him singing couplets dedicated to pleasure.16 Once the operation was over, the girl would cry (L’opération finie, la fille pleurait), but would easily recover her composure and make a thousand caresses to her new spouse as well as to all those who had been witnesses. There is some evidence that these are the same ceremonies as are used in their weddings; there may be some other formalities required, I believe this all the more readily because [when it happened that] an officer from the Etoile to whom a young Indian girl had offered herself was not favourably disposed, a Cytheran [named Ahutoru], the same one who joined us on board to follow us in our travels, took the girl and showed the officer how he should act. If there were no other formalities than those for a marriage, he would not have acted in this way. Moreover, all they did for us can only be viewed as honors they wished to pay to strangers. Married women are a model of faithfulness [… but “those who are unmarried are free and prostitute themselves with whomever takes their fancy”]. (Fesche 2002: 259–60; words in brackets added by author) A Forced Encounter Fesche begins his passage by saying, “their marriages are, I believe, made in public.” But let us go straight to the conclusion: seeing the officer’s difficulty, Ahutoru gave a demonstration of what had to be done. Fesche saw in this further confirmation that “marriage” (what he was really interested in was the act of intercourse) was performed in front of everyone. But his remark about what Ahutoru did on this occasion is very useful. It confirms something that comes up on at least five occasions in the French accounts, namely, that the Tahitians did everything they could to force the French to engage in sexual intercourse. These were the episodes (Tcherkézoff 2004b: chapters 5–6): 1 The first contact at sea (5 April) involving two young girls “from thir­­teen to fourteen years old” who were presented in a canoe while the adults made gestures that clearly mimicked the act of intercourse.



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2 and 3 The presentation of “Venus” (the first Tahitian woman who went on board, an adolescent who was accompanying Ahutoru: 6 April) and of “Helen” (the scene of 7 April: Nassau caressed her breasts but found himself unable to go any further), where these two girls were brought forward by the adults or even the “elderly men.” Onlookers made explicit gestures, with one of them even using “very singular means” to attempt to arouse Nassau’s sexual interest. 4 Nassau’s walk around the village when, on going into one of the houses, he was surrounded, undressed, and examined and touched intimately (see above). 5 The escapade of Bougainville’s cook (5 or 6 April) who experienced the same fate, but with less solicitude apparently (he swam to shore, before the official landing, was felt over, and once the examination had been made, he was pressed up against a girl, gestures being made to show what was expected of him – absolutely terrified, of course, he could do nothing at all). On each of those occasions, the Tahitians wanted the French to perform the sexual act that they expected of them. This time, as Fesche describes it, Ahutoru also gave a practical demonstration. But Fesche only draws from the attitude taken by Ahutoru toward the officer an additional argument in support of the idea that Tahitian “marriages” always take place in this fashion, that is, “publicly.” And he sees the Tahitians’ attempt to extend this offer of “marriage” to the French merely as “honours they wished to pay to strangers” (or new “allies and friends” as Nassau put it in his narrative). The Youth of the Victims and the Ceremonial Framework The generalization made by Fesche takes up important elements of the forced presentations of young girls. The Frenchman speaks of “girls” and generalizes by referring to “the fathers and mothers who brought their girls” meaning, therefore, that in every case the victim was young. Apart from the generalizing expressions about “women,” which merely express the fantasies of the Frenchmen, both of our French reporters (Nassau and Fesche), when they describe the exact situation of the first presentations, use only the words “girl” and “young girl.” Moreover, in every case the girl was brought forward by others. The onlookers always formed a circle

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and held a “green branch” in their hand. From many concurring sources we know of the ritual role of these branches in Tahiti: they allowed a taboo to be set aside so that one could enter into contact with a superior (Tcherkezoff 2004b: 424–6). The formal, ceremonial aspect is quite clear. There is another element: a piece of tapa cloth might be thrown over the girl at the crucial moment. Therefore it was not a question of voyeurism on the part of the audience with the aim of arousing collective sexual excitement. This further discredits the notion of the Tahitian taste for lovemaking performed “publicly.” It similarly calls into question the theory prevailing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that held that Tahitians made offerings to please the gods in the form of acts of human copulation performed in the open so that they would be visible from the heavens (Moerenhout 1837, Handy 1927; see Tcherkezoff 2004b: 463–6, 474–7). But this gesture also points to something tangible. If we move forward in time and take into account more detailed Polynesian ethnography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we invariably see that the fact of wrapping a person in tapa cloth is always a ritual gesture the aim of which is to call down the presence of the sacred forces from the world of the gods onto the earthly stage and to give efficacy to their actions (Valeri 1985; Babadzan 1993, 2003; Tcherkézoff 2002, 2003b, 2004a: chapter 10).

Neither Love nor Pleasure If we consider our two cases from Samoa and Tahiti, we should note that the presentation concerned “young girls.” The girls were even “very young,” as Lapérouse heard from his officer Vaujuas (Tcherkézoff 2004a: 45) and indeed as Fesche’s physical description of the Tahitian girl presented on 7 April attests. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of all the published narratives and journals for each of these two visits leads us to the certain conclusion that the very first presentations concerned only the “young girls.” The “women” were not involved. Their role was to bring forward the young girls and surround them, and to make sexual gestures – in the same way that they would stand behind the young virgins in the ceremonial dances performed to invoke the procreative powers of the male gods. This they did repeatedly, the most likely reason being that they wanted to explain to the visitors what was expected of them.



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However that may be, the constant references to the girls’ young age must henceforth completely invalidate the main hypothesis initially proposed by the French and then recycled in the form of a Western myth persisting until today: the sexual encounters had not been organized by the Tahitians and the Samoans in the name of love and pleasure. The hypothesis put forward by certain Frenchmen about these young girls being driven to satisfy their desire in the constant search for new lovers is totally untenable for the type of encounters we have seen described when we take into account the girls’ young age and their fear in front of these unknown creatures. On the other hand, if we consider the situation from the chiefs’ perspective, and imagine that their motive for presenting the French with young girls, even ones shrouded in tears, was to offer sexual pleasure to their visitors, we come up against two obstacles. First, this would suggest that the Polynesians had immediately seen the French as ordinary men, but I have conclusively shown elsewhere, drawing on a wide range of examples, that this hypothesis must be abandoned, because it is incompatible with too many other aspects of Polynesian society and culture of that time and as described by the same early visitors.17 Second, one could ask why these men, if their idea had been to please their visitors with a “sexual gift,” would have chosen for this purpose young or very young girls, distressed and physically tense, rather than young women who were just as attractive but more experienced. Young women who would most likely have been less frightened would have been preferable sexual partners and surely a more likely choice for sexual hospitality.18 In Polynesia the person of the young unmarried woman (and who has not given birth), holds an essential place in the “human” collectivity or ta(n)gata. Throughout Polynesia, societies have reserved a quite specific vocabulary for such a person, distinguishing her thus from the child, from the mother, from the woman as a sexual partner, and from women in general.19 But we are still waiting for persuasive evidence that sexual pleasure has something to do with young girls’ distinctive status. All we have is Handy’s unreliable reconstruction (1923, 1927) of a hypothetical Marquesan culture in which, he claims, the overriding purpose of this period of a woman’s life was to collect lovers. Mead followed close behind and thought she had confirmed this for Samoa when she heard her foremost male informant, a young teacher who was rather full of himself, smugly tell her about his sex

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life and his many female conquests. Mead made the grave error of attributing to the two sexes a vision that was an exclusively Samoan male view conveyed to her by this favourite informant.20 This male vision, which one finds elsewhere in Polynesia as well, was itself the expression of the normal fantasy life of young men, one that derived from myths glorifying the sexual appetite of the male gods and of the chiefs. It must be understood within the double standard21 of the male conquest of virgins versus the female preservation of virginity until marriage. An important consequence flowed from this: Mead did not pay any attention to the fact that the detailed account that this teacher gave her of his real or imaginary conquests also indicated that the young girl was often coerced and that she would subsequently have to suffer the reproaches and even blows of her family if the affair became public.22 The Question of Virginity in the French Accounts: The Girls’ Deflowering and Tears Finally, a spectre haunts these texts: that of deflowering. The words for which I have added the original French version in Fesche’s description of “marriages” strongly imply something never explicitly stated, either in Bougainville’s official account or in any of the journals. Let us reiterate these elements: the likely age of the girls presented; phrases indicating that they “made a fuss” before proceeding to the awaited act; the fact that the girl “was crying”; and especially the word “operation” which in French (as in English), when it is used in reference to the human body, implies some kind of serious surgical procedure. All of these things when considered together lead us to conclude that the sexual act offered to the visitor implied defloration. We can see that Bougainville’s 1771 readers, who were presented with nothing but delightful and beguiling scenes and visions, had no conception that the young women of “New Cythera,” whose “only passion is love,” as Bougainville told them, were in fact, in the arms of these Frenchman, not women gaily displaying their flower necklaces and their desires, but girls weeping: girls who were undergoing their first act of sexual intercourse and who were terrified to be thrown into the arms of unknown creatures to whom superhuman powers were attributed. One of Bougainville’s sentences, brief as it is, suddenly reveals that the officers and sailors had not hidden the truth from their captain (who has mostly stayed on board during the visit). It was always, if we take Fesche’s generalization as a guide, or



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sometimes the case that the girl brought forward and presented to the French was a virgin. If at least some members of the expedition had not so remarked to Bougainville, it would be difficult to see why, at the moment of his departure, he wrote, in reference to the peaceable character which seemed to him to typify Tahitian society: “love, the only God to which I believe these people offer any sacrifices. Here blood does not run on the altars [presumably a reference to human sacrifices] or if sometimes it reddens the altar the young victim is the first to rejoice at having spilt it” (Dunmore 2002: 72–3). We now have enough data to definitively depart from those Western illusions and to come back, with more precision, to Marshall Sahlins’s pioneering view: theogamy and not sexual hospitality.

Notes 1 This study was elaborated while I was hosted several times during 2001–02 at the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury, and was presented at the 2nd Western Polynesia and Fiji Workshop (CREDO , Marseille, 2002) gathered around Marshall Sahlins. All my thanks to Dr Stephanie Anderson for her editing (finalized on a much longer version elaborated later, when I was ARC Fellow at the Gender Relations Centre, Australian National University, during 2004–05, which was to be included into a collective work (M. Jolly, S. Tcherkézoff, and D. Tryon, eds., 2009: chapter 4); some changes here have been introduced by me and thus, when a passage sounds more “Frenglish” than English, responsibility is only mine. 2 See Tcherkézoff (2003a: 384) on Tongan and Hawaiian cases quoted by Douaire-Marsaudon (1998: 182–3) and Sahlins (1985a), in addition to the description of Samoan “marriages” (Tcherkézoff 2003a: chapter 8 passim). 3 For this theme in Tonga, see Douaire-Marsaudon (1998: 182–3); for Tokelau, see Tcherkézoff (2003a: 48–9). There are also Samoan legends on this topic. 4 There are very precise descriptions of the Samoan dances of the 1830s in Williams’s journal (Tcherkézoff 2003a: 384–7). In relation to Tahiti, Cook and Banks had noted that the young girls learning and practising the dances had to give up this specialized learning “as soon as they have form’d a connection with man” (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 303–4). 5 The complete account told by Teuira Henry is quoted by Oliver (1974: 414–16). 6 This led to taking a deep interest in gathering and making available sources of “first” and early encounters between Europeans and Pacific

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peoples. A joint program with Anne Salmond was elaborated, supported by the French “Pacific Fund” and French Embassies of Wellington and Canberra. Some results are now available online (www.pacific-encounters. fr), with the participation of the EHESS Branch hosted by ANU (www. pacific-dialogues.fr). Although Diderot himself really only proposed this idea in jest (Diderot 1964 [1796]: 499–501). When Diderot circulated his piece (1772) (unpublished until much later because of censorship), the 2nd edition of Bougainville’s Voyage had just come out in French with a “Supplément” (title of volume 2, which is the French translation of the anonymous first available narrative from Cook’s expedition, published in London in 1771), and Diderot probably found there the idea of his own title. The sexual encounters were not Sahlins’s main topic. In this lecture and in a book published the same year 1981, he dealt mainly with the rise and fall of Captain Cook’s fortunes in Hawaii (Sahlins 1981a, 1985a: chapter 1. Many other works on this question were to follow (see references in Sahlins 1995). The hypothesis of theogamy rests on the hypothesis that Polynesians have seen Europeans as flesh and bone forms of superhuman entities, as images of the gods (but not fundamentally different from the ritual images, elaborated in wood and barkcloth, used by Polynesians in their yearly rites of fecundity). The case considered was how Captain Cook has been assimilated to such an image of the Hawaiian god Lono – and not how Captain Cook would have been just “taken for Lono,” as Gananath Obeyesekere (1992) abusively simplified and presented Sahlins’s hypothesis (see Tcherkézoff 2004a: 109–53). I cannot attempt to show it here, but there are some strong elements, even if few of them, within the narratives concerning early encounters in Aotearoa, Tonga, Marquesas, and Rapa Nui that open the possibility for a generalization of the hypotheses drawn here for Samoa and Tahiti (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 189–97). See pictorial portfolios in Tcherkézoff (2004a, 2004b): Lapérouse refers to the drawing by John Webber (the artist on Cook’s third voyage) of a Tahitian girl bringing gifts of barkcloth and necklaces (we can see the extent to which the Tahitian scene played on Lapérouse’s mind when he visited Samoa). In his book, Bougainville only admitted to having noticed a temporary shyness or hesitation when the girls were presenting “themselves” to the French; but he was convinced that it was ingrained in the “nature of women” always to “claim not to want what they desire the most” (prétendent ne pas vouloir ce qu’elles désirent le plus) (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 128, 203).



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12 The French expression may imply physical pain as well as “sorrow.” 13 This was a ritual gesture that made the way open for stepping into a sacred and tabooed area (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 424–6). 14 As we now know from his own journal. 15 We should remember that the French only communicated by signs, as we know from the descriptions of other scenes. 16 As the French were unable to understand what was being sung, this is only Fesche’s interpretation. 17 See references above n3, and Tcherkézoff (2004a) for Samoa (60–2) and for Tonga, Hawaii, Cook, etc. (109–53), and in relation to the term “Papala(n)gi” used in Western Polynesia (193–6); for Tahiti (200–1). 18 As shown by various chants, all Polynesian cultures plainly recognized the desirability of sexual pleasure for both sexes (and practices involving sexual mutilation were quite foreign to them). 19 As tapairu in Maori or, in Samoan, tamaitai, tausala, augafaapae (in sharp distinction to fafine). 20 Aside from the whole question of how the Western myth about Polynesian sexuality obviously influenced her interpretation in the field, the main thrust of the revised view that we must now adopt in relation to Mead’s interpretation of girls’ adolescence in Samoa bears on gender roles. She thought that she had understood the feminine perspective on sexuality in Samoa, but in fact it was her male informant, absent from the published book but crucial in her field notes, who was her source (Tcherkézoff 2001a: chapter 8 passim). As these girls were constantly “joking-and-lying” (pepelo) when telling her the story of their supposedly free and easy private lives, their discourse (quite at odds with what they were actually experiencing but Mead did not realize it) appeared to Mead to correspond well enough with what her male informant had told her (Tcherkézoff 2001b). 21 I use this expression for the sake of brevity. But it does not reflect accurately the two levels of the ideology involved here. On one level, where the ideology is governed by ideas of family inheritance, the ancestors’ cult, etc., girls as “the relationship to the whole,” feagaiga, are seen as somewhat asexual, while boys, who are all their “brothers,” “serve” them. On another level, according to a universalistic notion of gender dualism and heterosexuality, boys as “males” are supposed to become full males by showing their ability to conquer the “females” (Tcherkézoff 1993, 2003a: chapter 7). 22 I have analyzed and published (in French) the informant’s account (Tcherkezoff 2003a: 366–71); for the original English text of this account, see Orans (1996).

6 Chassé-croisé: Or How Christianity Appropriated Indigenous Appropriation of Christianity on the Rio Negro Manuela Carneiro da Cunha The intellectual influence of Marshall Sahlins is pervasive in Brazilian anthropology. On a more personal level, since his groundbreaking essay “The Original Affluent Society” (in Sahlins 1972) I have counted myself as a devotee. This essay, however, is connected to Sahlins’s oeuvre in two more specific ways. I’ll spell out the first at once and will reserve the second for the end of this chapter. Sahlins has repeatedly made the case for the indigenization of Western cosmologies and for the reconfiguration of Western happenings into Indigenous events. Around a single happening, different events take place for different people, simultaneous yet mostly opaque to one another. Thus, everyone is making history, albeit in one’s own terms. As a counter-reading to the narrative of Western political, historical, and cosmological hegemony, anthropological analysis has mostly analyzed the Indigenous refraction of missionary endeavours. Yet missionary cosmologies are no less interesting than their Indigenous counterparts, and the analyses of missionary refractions of Indigenous discourse are to be similarly studied. Missionaries, after all, carry wherever they go their own potent cosmology. Lowland South American Indigenous people have been noteworthy for their tendency of appropriating foreign intangible as well as tangible goods in a particularly voracious manner. Their all-too-ready adoption of Christian manners and rituals in the sixteenth century



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was perplexing for the missionaries, who were led to condemn them as simulacra, as counterfeit Catholics (Vainfas 1995). Yet, at the very same time, Jesuits were discussing evidence among the Indians of an ancient pre-Columbian evangelization, since the New Testament by definition had to have global reach. Hence, Jesuits appropriated local myths of the Flood as evidence of biblical knowledge, and the traces of (the mythical character) Sumé’s feet on a rock as evidence of the early passage to the New World of Saint Thomas, the apostle. Sumé, it was argued, could well be the result of a linguistic drift from Tomé, which is Thomas in Portuguese (Carneiro da Cunha 1990). Appropriation was and still is a two-way street. The contemporary story I am about to tell in great detail bears witness to the same processes: appropriations and counter-appropriations are the rule for both missionaries and missionized.

News of a Miracle-Working Statue When we arrived to do our fieldwork, reports of a miraculous little statue reached us at once. We had landed in Santa Isabel that very morning, Laure Emperaire, my botanist friend and I, and we were having some fried fish, cassava flour, and beans as the restaurant owner broke the news. We would hear it again and again, retold with small variations by everyone: actually everyone but the priests, the nuns, and a few catechists who insisted on a different story.1 The popular version went more or less as follows. A man far upriver was in his canoe. A young woman was standing on the shore opposite the village. She asked him to take her across the river and overcame his objections that the canoe was much too small. The man was paddling at the prow. When he looked back at his passenger, she had turned into a small statue of Our Lady of Aparecida.2 People in the village wanted to erect a church in her honour, but they lacked money. In order to collect funds, they built a canoe for the statue, affectionately called “Santinha” (literally ‘little saint’). The canoe had no paddles, but it miraculously managed to float on its own downriver, to pass the Ipanoré Rapids and to reach the town of São Gabriel da Cachoeira. The people in São Gabriel put the Santinha and its canoe onto a larger boat and escorted it to the next village downriver. From then on, the statue would stay three days in every community and then

Figure 6.1.  The Upper and Middle Rio Negro basin. Source : Instituto Socioambiental, 2008.



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continue its voyage. In Santa Isabel, a town of some seven thousand inhabitants, the Santinha was feted for three days in each of the town’s seven neighbourhoods plus three days in the town’s main church. It had remained there for almost a month. A month prior to our arrival, the Santinha had left Santa Isabel, and it was now again on her way downriver. There was some uncertainty regarding its final destination: some would say Barcelos, some Carvoeiro further downriver, and some would even say it was due to go down to Manaus, where the Rio Negro ends and merges with the Solimões to form the Amazon River. The greatest variations, however, had to do with the apparition itself: where had the ominous event taken place? Everyone I talked to seemed to come up with a different version. Someone mentioned Nazaré on the Cubate River, another one a place upriver from the Caruru Rapids, still another one pointed to Tunuí on the Içana River, and two people mentioned Querari, the name of both a river and a community on the border with Colombia (see Figure 6.1). It so happened that the priest who had presided over the launching of the statue in Iarauetê had a completely different story to tell, with pictures of the launching to prove it. Father Reginaldo, an amiable Brazilian Salesian priest in his late thirties, had been appointed director of the Salesian mission in Iauaretê in 2005. Iauaretê is a town of some twenty-five hundred, inhabited by Arawakan-speaking Tariano until the establishment of a Salesian mission in 1930, and it is at present a multi-ethnic site comprising Upper Rio Negro Tukanoanspeaking groups (Andrello 2006). Actually, Iauaretê is the only existing town on Brazilian Indigenous land. A special Eucharist Congress was to take place in October 2005 all over Brazil, for the first time since 1980. The appointment of Father Reginaldo was locally commented upon as a move toward replacing foreign missionaries by Brazilian ones (Martini 2009.) There were other important changes going on in Iauaretê at the time. The administration of schools was passing from nuns’ into the hands of Indigenous teachers. Ipanoré, a river rapid where humanity would have emerged on the Uaupés River, was being anointed by the National Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute (IPHAN, Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional) as the very first intangible cultural heritage space in Brazil.3 The effervescence of a revival, punctuated by frequent traditional festivals, was in the air (ibid.). In July 2006 Father Reginaldo,

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who is of a generation attuned to post–Vatican II sensibilities with regard to local traditions, himself organized an innovative Catholic festival that explicitly incorporated folk and Indigenous elements. He enrolled all ten communities or neighbourhoods of Iauaretê and suggested the launch of a castelo (literally, a castle) – a floating balsa structure with votive candles that is sent downriver. Launching a castelo is part of the very popular and traditional Amazonian saints’ festivals that are said to go back to the time of Jesuit missions in the seventeenth century. A viable castelo should go far, and fishermen upon finding one anticipate good luck. Iauaretê had been under the firm control of the Salesians for decades, and people there were not allowed to indulge in what was considered folk Catholicism. That Father Reginaldo would suggest the launching of a castelo testifies to a new orientation. In the community of Our Lady of Aparecida – a mixed neighbourhood established in the 1980 where Tariano live along with Pira-Tapuia, Tukano, Arapasso, and Wanano (Andrello 2006: 131) – an elderly couple offered to lend a private statue of Our Lady of Aparecida.4 The statue was installed on an altar (some described it as a small boat) on top of the castelo. On 25 July 2006, as a closing ceremony to the saints’ festival, the parishioners assembled at dusk at the edge of the Uaupés River and watched as the castelo was sent off downstream. The idea was for the statue to spend one night at every community of the parish, under the care of the local catechist who would then be responsible for having the community hand over the statue to the next community downstream. Iarauaetê parish limits are the Ipanoré Rapids, and because Urubuquara is the last village in the parish, its catechist was supposed to return the statue to the main church of Iarauetê. However, people downstream from Ipanoré, from the adjacent parish of Taracuá, said that they too would like to be visited by Our Lady of Aparecida, and Father Reginaldo agreed to their request. That is where things began getting out of hand. In Taracuá, Our Lady of Aparecida appeared to a man in his dream, and she requested a church to be built in her honour. That was the start of the miraculous career of the statue and that was also the start of offerings. Chests were installed alongside the statue, and the money collected was to be used in the restoration of benches in the chapel of Aparecida in Iarauetê. As other parishes also asked for a visit, ultimately the statue continued its voyage eventually arriving



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in São Gabriel da Cachoeira on 9 October, three and a half months after its launching. It would stay in São Gabriel for a little under a month. São Gabriel is by now a relatively large town boasting thirty to forty thousand souls5 with Indigenous people from all over the Upper Rio Negro accounting for around 85 per cent of the inhabitants. São Gabriel is the only municipality in Brazil where there are three other official languages besides Portuguese: Baniwa (Arawakan), Tukano (Tukanoan), and Nheengatu (an Amazonian lingua franca introduced by Jesuits and based on Tupi). São Gabriel houses the headquarters of an active Indigenous organization. A growing military and a declining Catholic missionary presence, an important non-governmental environmental and human rights organization, a research institute, and a university satellite campus make São Gabriel a significant urban centre with crime on the rise and a diversified set of Protestant denominations and heterodox sects. Father Reginaldo suspects São Gabriel to be the source of what could be called a ritual hijacking. An incongruous ultra-conservative Catholic sect (on which more later) wrote up in minute detail the ritual that was supposed to be observed in Our Lady’s visit and for good measure threw in a book by the sect’s founder to be read during the ceremonies. Both the book and ritual prescriptions were to follow the statue everywhere. Twenty-two communities later, Our Lady entered the town of Santa Isabel on 2 February, 2007, where she stayed until 1 March (Fontes 2006). By that time, Father Reginaldo had been transferred as director of the Salesian mission from Iarauetê in the Upper Rio Negro to Santa Isabel in the Middle Rio Negro. As he received a miraculous image with an unorthodox story and a hyper-orthodox ritual in lieu of the simple statue he himself had launched some six months earlier, one can guess he had to do some soul-searching. Ultimately, he decided not to interfere too much and just added a one-page signed report with the “true” origin of the statue (Oliveira 2006). The report was carefully worded and did not directly challenge the popular belief about the statue having sailed unharmed on its own or about the benefits it could impart, though the word miracle was of course avoided and replaced by the more neutral “grace.” Although this document travelled with the statue from Santa Isabel on, I never saw anyone paying any attention to its story.

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Meeting the Santinha One day after landing in Santa Isabel, we started downriver. I was secretly hoping to catch up with the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida, while my botanist friend was hoping not to have her work program messed up by such unanticipated distraction. I was lucky. Not only had we not already missed the fluvial procession, it was still two villages upriver from Tapereira, where we were going to stay. A few days later Tapereira was busily preparing itself for the visit, and on 15 April the procession moored, after launching fireworks and circling three times in front of the village. In preparation men went out fishing until the catch was impressive enough, and they provided festive decorations. There was a colonnade of palm leaves leading to the school and balloons. Everything else was women’s work: cleaning fish, getting coal, cooking an abundant and varied meal, and later serving guests, cleaning up, and so on. For the Santinha hardly came alone. Families from the next village upriver were supposed to escort her, and a few people from the next stop downriver would also come to honour her. Then, too, many people from previous stops would have vowed (promised) to accompany it for a longer stretch of the river, usually for three or four stops. And then there were the families who lived in their small farms nearby rather than in villages and would not receive a special visit from the Santinha. That made up for an impressive crowd of visitors, whose hammocks would be hung under an old thatch roof nearby. The main statue in the local chapel altar was taken out to the riverbank with great ceremony in order to greet the visiting image. The honour of carrying it fell upon the eleven-year-old daughter of the community administrator or “captain.” Upon disembarking, the Santinha on its litter was carried around by men to pay a visit to every single house in the hamlet. The crowd followed. Having made a complete tour of the village, the Santinha was installed with great care and pomp upon the table at which the schoolmaster usually sat. Local images coming either from the village chapel or from people’s homes were then placed on a small table to the right of the main display where the little statue of Our Lady of Aparecida was standing, with hundreds of satin ribbons attached to its neck. These ribbons were mostly inscribed with requests, a tradition from the Rio Negro down to Pará that allegedly goes back to Carmelite



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missionaries three centuries ago. In Pará, however, I was later told by Father Reginaldo, people make a knot at the end of the ribbon to ensure compliance from the saint. On the Rio Negro, one does not resort to such pressure. Requests and supplications inscribed on the ribbons and sometimes on paper speak to people’s tribulations and aspirations. Some are amazingly candid and their authors can be easily identified. They amount to a public display of private issues: O Mother protect me from all forthcoming evil, give me health, joy, rid me of these vices of mine, tobacco and liquor … help me to live in harmony with my wife. I want you to rid me of my debts so that I can give some money to my mother for her to buy construction materials for our new house. Lady, never allow me to be without work. Don’t let me go unemployed so that one day my mother may feel proud of me. I want you to take away bad thoughts from my children’s heads [followed by the names of her four children]. Other requests are more secretive: “and help us with your grace to reach what we want to build for financial return [sic], have everything turn out well, mother Aparecida.” Almost all of them testify to a very strong bond between mothers and children that is also evident in life histories: “Our Lady of Aparecida, protect my children, rid them of their drunkenness, have pity.” Drunkenness is a regional scourge, affecting mostly men but not sparing women altogether. Boys start drinking hard in their early teens, and from Friday evening until Sunday most unmarried men and a great number of mature and old men are expected to be drunk. Women seem to take their husbands’ and sons’ drunkenness as a regrettable matter of course. They draw a line elsewhere, for they sharply distinguish between men who hit or beat their wives when under the influence from those, ethically acceptable, that refrain from so doing. I have come across two telling cases. One woman adamantly refused to marry the father of her five children on the grounds that he used to beat her when drunk. Another woman only agreed to marry her long-time companion when he promised to no longer beat her when drunk; she assured me he had kept his promise since then. This also implies that marriage is taken very seriously.

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Miracles The Santinha’s power manifested itself in several ways. She bestowed signals, she performed miracles, and she would provide help in the future through relics that stored, so to say, her powers. Signals came up in many guises. She would wink to some people. She would shed a tear for some others. An old Baniwa woman in the village had become Protestant while living in town. Her neighbour told me the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida, looking at her, had shed a small tear that everyone had been able to see, and at once the old woman had gone back to being Roman Catholic. If this is any proof, I did spot the old woman in the chapel. People (mostly sinners and Protestants) would “die” in her presence. I became alarmed at hearing this until I was told the expression referred to fainting rather than actually dying. Our Lady also wanted people to offer gifts with an open heart. She would know when this was not the case, and people would be returned their offerings at night and thus be publicly embarrassed. Storage of her power was important. Under the table where the statue and its boat were set, people put open bottles with water and many boxes of unlit candles. These items were to stay there for the three nights it would be spending in the community. The candles were then kept with care: they would illuminate people once the great darkness sets in and the world comes to an end. The water in the open bottles would have a more immediate use, since it was blessed with several curative virtues. One drop of it would impart a similar blessing to other recipients of the water, so one would always have blessed water available. A woman from the village asked us for a bottle of mineral water: she placed it under the table of the Santinha and intended to use it for treating her eyes. But Our Lady’s power was not only stored for future use. It was also already credited with many miracles, of which most were touchingly trivial. The only other great miracle I heard of – besides the original one, which is the apparition of the statue itself – was that she had stayed unharmed when Protestants, who would not believe in her, set her boat on fire. As proof, I was shown the supposedly charred beam of the boat itself. Another story told about some men who were supposed to be keeping a vigil for the Santinha, and instead they went outside to play dominoes, a favourite regional game. At some point, a dark



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cloud rose from the ground that frightened the men and had them running inside for cover. There were other stories: a man had a brand new padlock but had lost its key. He put the padlock next to the statue of a saint that he had left beside the Santinha for her to bless. A few days later, the padlock turned up open! There was a river peddler (marreteiro) in Santa Isabel. He did not believe in the little statue of Our Lady of Aparecida. The man had a motorcycle and enjoyed riding it while in town. One day while he was visiting a friend he left the motorcycle key in its keyhole. When he came out of the house, the key was no longer there. He thought that was a bad joke from his buddies and was quite angry at them. That night, the Santinha appeared in his dream, and she told him he lacked faith and should not be angry at his friends. The next day, the key reappeared, attached to one of the ribbons around the statue. From that day on, the man believed that the statue was miraculous and for one whole month, while it was in town, he followed the Santinha everywhere.

Domestic Altars, Village Chapels, and Saints A number of themes emerge here that need to be explicated such as dreams, household saints, and Protestants. Dreams are the usual medium used by supernatural entities on the Middle and Upper Rio Negro for a direct communication with Catholics. There are no records of visions or other forms of communication.6 It is in dreams that people are enjoined to accomplish things. It was in a dream that the Santinha first enjoined people to make offerings to her. A significant proportion of such prescriptive dreams today addresses two main concerns: giving up liquor and legitimating a marriage before the priest and possibly in civil law. A Salesian priest reported that after the visit of Our Lady of Aparecida to Santa Isabel, the number of confessions and marriages went up significantly. It is not excluded that such pastoral results influenced the decision not to cut short the image’s pilgrimage. People treasure statues of saints. The village patron saint’s statue will be communally owned and placed in the chapel. Every year a festival will be held in the village on the occasion of that saint’s day, attracting a large gathering from other villages. However, other statues can be privately held, and they subject their owners to the

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obligation of providing an annual festival for them. These privately owned images can be stored in one’s house, on a domestic altar, or entrusted to the village chapel. The importance attached to such statues is clear from the following example. An old Baniwa man I met in the community of Espírito Santo had two statues that came from his wife’s family. When his father-in-law passed away, the two were left mostly unattended. In fact, they actually were inherited by his wife’s brother, but as his brother-in-law was due to leave town (Barcelos), he offered them to him. “I’m not asking for them, mind you,” the man answered with proper decorum. “But I am staying in town.” “Then you keep them,” said the brother-in-law. “But you’ll have to see to their festival.” When the old man eventually left Barcelos himself he took along the statues. Every year, he provides all the food for the “Santissimo” festival, while the ritual itself is taken over by the “festival employees” such as the festival judge, the pole judge (juiz do mastro) or the major-domos, some of whom will be fulfilling (paying) a vow in accepting their roles. Miraculous statues, though individually found, are usually considered as belonging to a specific locality, rather than privately held. When I enquired about precedents in miraculous statues, I was told by one old Baniwa woman in the Espírito Santo community that, many years earlier in the Cassiquiare River, a hunter had found a statue of Saint Solano. He placed it in the village chapel. The next day, the statue wasn’t there anymore – it had returned to the original place where it had been found. This happened several times in a row, and at last the statue was locked up in a prison cell. But the statue again returned to its original place. In dreams, it appeared to the hunter and asked that a chapel be built on the very spot it had been found. By now that spot is a village, and everyone who passes by should disembark and give some offering to it. This story, by the way, bears the classical format of Iberian apparitions as described by W. Christian Jr (1981). Images of saints insist on being worshipped at the place where they were found, and they return motu proprio to their original site. There are stories about miraculous statues that are rather privately held. Two of the Upper Rio Negro Indigenous prophets (on which more below) actually each received the statue of a saint (Saint Feliciano and Saint Dante, respectively) brought down to them from within a bolt of lightning (see Tõrãmu Bayaru (Wenceslau Sampaio Galvão) and Guahari Ye Ñi (Raimundo Castro Galvão) 2004: 661).



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Of course, miraculous statues are the exception by definition, and most statues are just that, statues. Yet people cherish their privately held images. When the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida was brought into the Tapereira community, the other saints from the village, public as well as private, were brought in and set up on a lower stand, to the right of Our Lady. When people were done chanting and kissing the ribbons around the statue they would then kneel before the local statues and kiss their ribbons in turn. The idea is for the local images to receive the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida in a proper fashion, and then have them partake in the miraculous atmosphere, by “contagion” as Lévy-Bruhl would have put it.

The Ritual in Tapereira For three days and three nights in a row and taking turns, people kept a vigil around the Santinha, installed in the open-air schoolroom in her miniature boat over the schoolmaster’s table and facing the river. At regular intervals, several times a day, people would line up with visitors taking precedence and locals following them. The long lines were for devoutly kissing the ribbons attached to the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida. People would start off by kneeling in front of the table deemed to be the “feet,” then before the right side (the left arm), the back (the head), and the left side (the right arm) in turn. After thus kissing the ribbons four times they would turn to the local statues and kiss their ribbons, too, though only once. While this ceremony went on, people would keep repeating the same song for at least half an hour: “Beijai, beijai, beijai com alegria, Jesus Cristo rei da terra, filho da Virgem Maria” (Come and kiss, kiss with joy, Jesus Christ king of the world, son of the Virgin Mary). Other religious activities consisted in reciting the rosary, singing hymns, and listening to mostly terrifying readings about the impending end of the world contained in the book by Bento da Conceição (see below). When I asked the catechist who this Bento was, she told me he was a saint who had direct contact with Our Lady of Aparecida. Some men were all the while busy building a castelo to be sent downriver on the last night of Our Lady’s visit. The castelo was lit with many candles and placed on a boat on which people sing hymns and to whom other singers on the shore respond. It is finally launched from the middle of the river, with its candles glowing in

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the dark – this is quite a spectacular and eerie moment. The script of the launching of a castelo seems strikingly similar to the initial launching of the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida in Iarauetê, which is likely to have been modelled on it. Local women were very busy preparing and serving meals to the visitors. Men but also some young women were mostly playing dominoes at a short distance. Children were happy to have so much company and romance was also in the air for young people. Such gatherings are the occasion for socializing on a scale otherwise unavailable. Three mornings after its first arrival, the statue in its small ceremonial miniature boat was taken into a proper boat wholly decorated in which it was to be carried to the next community. As the heterodox sect prescribed, a Brazilian flag was to be put up at the back of the boat, while a flag from the State of Amazon was to be put up at the prow. A flotilla of boats followed the little Santinha. After an hour and a half, we entered Carabixi and the same ritual followed. The Tapereira catechist formally presented the Santinha to his counterpart in Carabixi and had him sign for its reception in a logbook that some politician in Santa Isabel had offered. The school in Carabixi was decorated with myriad paper flags; however, lacking alternative sources of paper, these festive flags had been cut out of schoolbook pages.

Festivals for the Saints The ritual prescribed by the odd ultra-conservative sect followed to a great extent the annual festivals in honour of the local saints. That similarity was clearly perceived, and whenever any hesitancy about the ritual to be followed would arise, the precedents on which behaviour would be modelled were such festivals. Yet, as a number of people pointed out, there were now two crucial differences. While saints’ festivals are occasions for dancing and heavy drinking, there was to be neither drinking nor dancing during the visit of the miraculous statue. Festivals or festas in honour of the patron saints of a village, neighbourhood, or town are mentioned as far back as the eighteenth century, when the Rio Negro was under Carmelite religious jurisdiction. There are also references to such festivals by the nineteenth-century



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Brazilian poet cum ethnographer Gonçalves Dias (2002 [1861]: 133), and by the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Speaking of the Uaupés establishment described by the merchant he travelled with from Manaus, Wallace found the village to be almost deserted in 1850. He would write: “(Indians) only inhabit the village at times of festas, or on the arrival of a merchant like Senhor L.” (A.R. Wallace 1853: 138). Festivals in honour of saints appear to be very stable over time and have an interesting spatial distribution that seems to coincide with the rivers that were explored in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries while excluding more recently explored regions.7 From the Upper Rio Negro down to the estuary of the Amazon in Pará, they seem to follow the same patterns. The Amazonian writer José Veríssimo (1970 [1878]) describes a festival in honour of the Divino (the Holy Spirit) in the mid-Amazon in 1876, in which the kissing of the ribbons and other details are mentioned. In 1952 Eduardo Galvão was the first Brazilian anthropologist to earn a North American doctorate, at Columbia University, under Charles Wagley. His dissertation deals with religious life in a small town of Pará, Gurupá, and it was subsequently published in Brazil (Galvão 1955). More than fifty years later, thousand of miles upriver, Galvão’s descriptions would be perfectly suitable for Middle Rio Negro rituals. Fluvial processions circling three times before mooring, the launching of fireworks, the use of ribbons, and scores of other ritual habits could be pointed to. While rituals appear very stable, their organizational basis has changed significantly. Galvão mentions lay brotherhoods in Gurupá (which he calls Itá in his book) as sponsoring the festivals and notes their absence on the Upper Rio Negro in the 1950s (1979: 123). Lay brotherhoods were all-important for building churches, commissioning art, and providing services to their members from the late seventeenth century down to the end of the nineteenth century. In some regions of Brazil where Catholic orders such as Jesuits, Carmelites, Franciscans or others were forbidden to enter or were in too small numbers, brotherhoods de facto led the church. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church in Rome tried to regain its authority, a move that in Brazil led to a dramatic crisis pitting the bishop of Pará and the bishop of Pernambuco against lay brotherhoods backed by the imperial (Brazilian) government, and giving a fleeting victory to lay brotherhoods (Carneiro da Cunha 2013). Their disappearance as organizers of festivals is thus another

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sign of the growing centralization of the Catholic Church in the hands of the clergy. Popular or lay Catholicism is thus a permanent challenge for the established church. In the late nineteenth century, major Amazonian intellectuals such as J. Veríssimo (1970 [1878]) would deplore what they saw as the Indianization of Catholicism, going so far as to recommend the extinction of what is today more than ever before the major festival in Belém do Pará, the Nossa Senhora de Nazaré or Círio de Nazaré festival. As for the Upper Rio Negro itself, Catholicism was imparted somewhat in spurts. There were the occasional parish priest visits, two of which left valuable reports. A Jesuit mission aldeia in the midseventeenth century was followed in 1695 by Carmelites who kept a solid presence in the area for more than century after that. However, when Wallace visited the region in 1850, he found only one odd Carmelite, an ex-soldier who professed such a great respect for his frock that he would commit no sins or transgressions while wearing it during daytime. By then (in 1845), the Brazilian Empire had asked for the help of Italian Capuchin Franciscans for running Indian villages. Accordingly, a Capuchin was sent off to the region in 1850 but he seems to have remained only four years. Franciscans settled in the Lower Uaupés in 1880. Although they were welcomed for a while, their excessive zeal led them to sacrilegious extremities. Having obtained ritual flutes, trumpets, and masks from a Tariano – ritual objects that are to be strictly concealed from women – Friars Coppi and Cagnari publicly displayed such a mask first in the village plaza and then a couple of days later during mass. On 28 October 1883, Friar Coppi, on the pulpit, held a cross in one hand and a mask in the other and rhetorically asked his flock, “Tell me, which one is true?” As a result of such desecration, the Franciscans were expelled from Ipanoré by the outraged Tariano and had to run for their lives (Wright 1992: 261) The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century witnessed a scramble for religious provinces in the Amazon among different recently founded religious congregations. In 1914 Pope Pius X granted the Mission Province of the Rio Negro to the Dom Bosco Salesians.8 The Rio Negro Province was huge: 286,498 square kilometres and forty thousand souls. By 1915 a mission had been started in São Gabriel da Cachoeira. Barcelos mission, downriver on the Middle Rio Negro, was started in 1926. Iarauetê, on the



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border with Colombia, was founded in 1930.9 As Salesian fathers (and in 1923, Salesian nuns as well) established themselves, they adopted a muscular program of evangelization that entailed segregating many Indigenous children in six strict boarding schools, which persisted down to the 1980s. They forbade rituals and they forced headmen and shamans into surrendering precious ritual ornaments, boxes, and other regalia. They also had the communal longhouses destroyed. On the Rio Negro, Salesians, however, did it better than other religious orders, having more financial capital – and building strong political and social capital as well.10 There was, to be sure, early opposition by the Indian Protection Service (SPI, Serviço de Proteção aos Indios), created in 1910 by the military who followed Auguste Comte’s positivist credo and positivist church. This influential sector of the Brazilian military vocally objected to supporting Catholic missions among Indians with public money (Melo 2007). One of these men, Alípio Bandeira, actually launched a campaign of attacks aimed specifically at the Salesian missions, to wit his pamphlet bearing the suggestive title A Mystificação Saleziana (The Salesian Mystification) (Bandeira 1923). However, their objections were overcome and, from 1926 until 1936, the Brazilian government kept paying more than half of the missions’ expenses (Archivo Salesian Centrale, Roma A8630701). At that date, the Salesians had five churches, thirty-two chapels, and six health facilities in the province. In 1941 they obtained crucial logistical support from the Brazilian air force. By the 1970s Salesian missions in the Middle and Upper Rio Negro were held by the military in high esteem. It was understood that, by providing a sense of Brazilian nationality and enforcing the use of the Portuguese language in their boarding schools, they constituted a precious line of defence on the Brazilian border with Colombia and Venezuela.11 When, for example, American evangelical missionaries coming from Colombia started proselytizing on the Upper Içana by the late 1940s, with one American missionary (Sophie Muller, of whom more later) achieving great popularity, the Salesians set up a mission on the Lower Içana to stop Protestant attempts at Indigenous conversions. In 1953 SPI, the Indian Protection Service, obliged by expelling Sophie Muller back to Colombia. Protestantism and particularly Pentecostalism is known to have gained significant ground in Brazil in general. However, on the Rio

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Negro basin, so far, the progress of all versions of Protestantism has been held in check by the Salesians. The Protestant Baniwa might be the sole exception. The mission and Catholic boarding school of Santa Isabel was explicitly opened in 1942 to undercut the influence of a Baptist school on the stretch between Santa Isabel and São Gabriel. The Baptist school eventually shut down. In Santa Isabel several small evangelical churches attest to Protestant efforts, but physically they cannot compare to the massive church and the old boarding schools that overlook the river and are quite an impressive sight for anyone coming to Santa Isabel. In 2006 we saw a group of American Southern Baptists who had come to this small town in order to finish building and consecrating a Baptist church. Nevertheless, Protestant churches in the region have not nearly the influence they have elsewhere in the country. In the villages moreover, their influence is negligible.

The Internal Front: Popular Catholicism Indigenous rituals were thus being extirpated with relative ease on the Upper Rio Negro. A far more insidious and treacherous missionary front was aimed at fighting popular Catholicism everywhere in the mission fields. Lay brotherhoods, as Eduardo Galvão noted in the 1950s, were absent on the Upper Rio Negro, but even festivals in honour of the saints promoted by private individuals were shunned by the missionaries, on the grounds of their promoting non-religious activities such as dancing, along with more orthodox Catholic rituals (Galvão 1979: 122–3). Most of the early Salesians were Italian, but several priests from other nationalities joined and replaced them. Like in every religious order today there is a problem of recruitment. As the Austrian father who has been in the region for more than three decades puts it: “Europe is now a land in need of missions.” When I asked about Indigenous clergy, I was told that although there had been several candidates, “they lacked perseverance” and besides – this time sotto voce – “men had problems with alcohol.” I heard about an Indigenous priest who had quit the congregation, but information was fuzzy and people seemed ill at ease on the subject. There was, however, I was told, one Indigenous nun: only one, after fifty years of the establishment of the nuns in Santa Isabel.



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From the outset in the early twentieth century and down to this day, a great effort has been made by the Salesians to select and instruct catechists, have them conduct ceremonies on Sundays and on holidays in the chapels of the communities, and prepare children for their first communion. In January 1999 in Santa Isabel a twentyday course was given by Salesians from all over Brazil to instruct a group of 235 catechists! Regular visits of two or three days are paid to villages by a specially designated priest, although he might skip some villages where he doesn’t feel welcome or where attendance at services is low. All those efforts, however, do not result in perfect church control of the doctrine. In Espírito Santo village, the catechist in charge, who was among the 235 trained catechists, took his duties and responsibilities very seriously. He even organized communal meals after each service. However, not even he found anything strange or unorthodox in the book that had been smuggled in to accompany the miraculous statue of Our Lady of Aparecida. As a matter of fact, he found it inspiring and was pleased to receive a copy of it from a friend.

An Odd Sect The author of the book that accompanied the Santinha, Bento da Conceição, presents himself as a prophet who started receiving divine messages in 1994, in his mature years. He is a resident of the southern State of Santa Catarina, and I still haven’t found out how his doctrine spread thousands of miles from there to Barcelos on the Middle Rio Negro and probably upriver to São Gabriel. The book in question was volume IV of an opus of seventeen volumes and seven CDs! It is titled A Palavra Viva de Deus (The Living Word of God), subtitled Os Ceifadores (The Reapers) followed by a reference to Matthew 13:39, and it was published in Santa Catarina. There is a website, two phone numbers, and three email addresses. Most extraordinary are the miracles God bestowed on Bento. The founding one runs like this: In March 1992 Bento was on Taquarinha Beach in his State of Santa Catarina, and he sat to pray close to a small tree. As a falling dry leaf called his attention, he felt that something was happening. He looked at the tree branches and saw that God was present, for each branch had the form of a letter and together they spelled His Holy Name. He cut the branches and formed the word Deus (God).

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The photograph of that miraculous word stands prominently on the cover of all his books, and one can clearly see the picture on his website.12 Such a miracle was extolled in an endorsement by a priest and with explicit national pride was favourably compared to Guadalupe: The Divine Signature … In Brazil something even more spectacular happened. God left his signature. No Prophet, no Saint, no Mystic ever received the signature of god … (Padre Romulo Candido de Souza C.SS.R.) Another miracle, this one from 5 January 2001, occurred in which angels painted the Holy Face (of Jesus) on the wall, over a column in Bento’s chapel,13 while Jesus Himself sent Bento a message to the effect that this was His direct divine response to those who had cast doubts over the authenticity of the Turin shroud. A surgeon cum painter, described as a member of the Fine Arts Academy, was called in to give a detailed analysis of the painting, couched in technical terms, in which he described the Semitic features of the Face as well as the perfection of the painting technique that no human hand could account for. Among endorsements mostly by some Brazilian and Portuguese conservative priests, one stands out. On 9 June 2003 at exactly 8:05 p.m., the late Pope John XXIII sent a message from the afterlife, recommending to his successor, at the time John Paul II, to accept and recognize Bento’s message and oeuvre and intimating that the end of the world was coming. An interesting detail: he asserted his authority not only as a late pope but, by then, as a (recently and postmortem) canonized saint. The volume that was read aloud during the visit of the Santinha consisted in a series of divine “messages” and regularly started with the formula “My son Bento” followed by a homily. In such divine messages, God sounds like an ultra-conservative Roman Catholic, with an aversion for any Vatican II innovations. He recommends a modest dress code, family prayer, reciting the rosary, and taking communion from the hands of the priest, who should celebrate mass with his back to the assembly. He also speaks extensively about hell (which Bento allegedly saw in what was the source of his midlife conversion) and vituperates abortion.



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When I discussed the matter with an older Salesian, he stated that one could not properly call this a sect, since it did not prevent people from attending church. This curious definition of a sect might explain why the Salesian opposition to Bento da Conceição’s book and his ritual was only moderate at first. However, things were to dramatically change as the statute of Our Lady of Aparecida reached Barcelos. A year and a half after the passage of the Santinha, I was back in Santa Isabel only to hear the most confused accounts of what had happened in Barcelos. Young men had vandalized the boat of the statue, I was told. People wanted to keep it there, someone had robbed the money that had been offered, but it had been found and no one had been indicted. The Salesian bishop had taken the Santinha back upriver. Catholics were clearly embarrassed by the story, but Father Reginaldo gave me a candid account that was later corroborated by the superior of the nuns in Manaus. It seemed that the parish priest was out of town when the Santinha reached Barcelos. The followers of Bento da Conceição, on the other hand, were well organized there and tried to appropriate and capitalize on the statue. The nuns were outraged and hid the chests with the money to preserve the offerings, a move that predictably caused an uproar. Then people from the neighbourhood in Barcelos where the Santinha was wanted the statue to stay in their chapel, rather than in the main church. Against all odds, the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida had never­ theless completed its pilgrimage down to Carvoeiro and had returned to Barcelos, at which point the recently appointed Salesian bishop of the Rio Negro, born in Shanghai and raised in Brazil, had regained possession of it and taken it by plane to Iauaretê, thus hoping to put an end to the whole affair.

Messiahs of the Upper Rio Negro and Appropriation of Catholicism Festivals for the saints cover several thousand miles from the Brazilian border with Colombia and Venezuela along the Rio Negro and the Amazon down to its estuary; however, there is something specific in the religiosity of Upper Rio Negro societies. From the mid-nineteenth century on, an impressive series of messianic movements with different protagonists have been registered in that

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area. It appears that the first such wave of messianism was led by Arawak-speaking Baniwa, and it was able to spread to most of the twenty-two Indigenous societies of the area speaking a variety of Arawak and Tukanoan languages.14 By 1857 Venancio Kamiko, also called Venancio Christu, a Baniwa Indian on the Içana River, started a “Religion of the Cross” that endured at least until the first decade of the twentieth century. Venancio Christu, by the way, enjoined the celebrations of saints’ festivals. Another prophet, Alexandre, came some time later. Then came Vicente Christu, an Arapasso. By the 1920s Uetsu, son of Venancio Kamiko, was leading a renewed messianic movement. Then from the 1950s until the 1970s, Kuduí, another Baniwa prophet, gained ascendancy (Wright 2005). At the end of the 1940s a most extraordinary messianic cult appeared on the Upper Içana. Its heroine was none other than an American Adventist evangelical missionary, Sophie Muller, the adventurous daughter of a Catholic German father and a Protestant North American mother (Wright 1992, 2005). Appropriation of Catholicism in these stories is quite salient. Venancio Christu Kamiko and Vicente Christu, of course, appropriated Christ’s title. Vicente foretold that missionaries would come and reinforce his teachings. Statues of Venancio Kamiko show him dressed in Franciscan frocks, and many of those prophets had resurrection stories modelled on Christ’s. Brazilian Indigenous symbolic voracity, that is, the adoption and indigenization of other peoples’ traditions and religions, has been historically documented since the sixteenth century. There are records of similar stories – the Santidades – dating from the sixteenth century and involving Tupi and Guarani societies on the coast. There, too, as I have mentioned elsewhere, there was full-hearted appropriation by Indians of Catholic themes, symbols, and main figures such as Christ himself, which caused no little scandal among Jesuits and colonial authorities (Carneiro da Cunha 1995, Vainfas 1995). Lévi-Strauss (1991) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1993), among others, have discussed that peculiarity, namely, what could be described as openness to the foreign and a readiness to incorporate it:15 something like an excessive disposition to adopting other people’s manners. Adoption should here be understood not as compliance with other people’s dictates, but rather in the etymological sense of making them one’s own child,



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tailoring them to one’s order, situation, and aspirations. Aspirations are central here, for having access to commodities, foreign wealth, or even achieving foreign identity – becoming colonists and patrons instead of exploited Indians – played a significant role for pursuing such adoption. It is no accident, I think, that from the early colonial period, missionaries in Catholic America found it, on the one hand, exceedingly easy to convert Indigenous people16 and yet, on the other hand, soon found out that Catholicism ran the danger of being instead converted to Indigenous manners (Carneiro da Cunha 1990). Alan Durston (2004), for one, documents the problems involved in recovering control of the translation of catechisms in early colonial Lima.

Counter-appropriations Although appropriation and indigenization of Christianity have been widely discussed topics, the flip side, that is, Christianity’s counter-appropriations have received much less attention. A good example of that two-way struggle for control of symbols is the story of the Cross in Upper Rio Negro. Desana Indians’ narratives published in 2004 (Tõrãmu Bayaru and Guahari Ye Ñi 2004) name the already mentioned, Baniwa Christu, aka Venancio Kamiko, as the inventor of the “Chant of the Cross,” who would have imparted that song to another Baniwa from the Orinoco River, Alicente, and to Tomaso, a Pira-tapuia from a tributary of the Papuri River. Tomaso in turn taught Vicente, a Wanano, and Joaquim Parakata, a Tukano. It was Joaquim who taught the song of the Cross to a lot of different people, Desana, Tuyuka, Karapanã, Tariano, and Pira-tapuia. A Desana, Benedito, taught it to a Maku and to others. But then in the following generation, all who knew the song had died. Three generations passed before a little Desana girl, Maria, emerged. As a toddler, she cried for a drum and a cross, which her father duly provided. She would then sing the “Chant of the Cross” without ever having been taught. After her early death, a Tukano named Cesário or Ñahuri arose. He learned the song in a dream. He preached the same precepts as Maria. He died of old age, and three years later Raimundo, the son of another prophet, José, learned the “Chant of the Cross” in a dream. He was a Tukano from the Turi River. Raimundo was the last messiah of the Rio Negro. It was he who

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erected a cross right in front of his house and performed prodigies. He also predicted the arrival of missionaries and assured people that they would reinforce his teachings. The narrators (Tõrãmu Bayaru and Guahari Ye Ñi 2004) end up enumerating all the prophets of the Cross, leaving out Vicente for some reason: Kamiko, Tomaso, Alicente, Joaquim Parakata, Benedito, Maria, Ñahuri, José, and Raimundo. There is an interesting distinction emphasized between the first group of prophets and the later messiahs. Although there is an uninterrupted line of transmission between Kamiko and the next four prophets, the latter group of four all learned the song by themselves. Raimundo, it is said, erected a Cross around 1910–15. The followers of the Cross indigenized Catholicism in good Sahlinsian fashion. The Salesians fought this appropriation with two strategies. An older one concerned the reappropriation of the alienated symbols. The other followed the Vatican II formula: the Catholicization of Indigeneity. Take the case of the Cross. One might bring in at this juncture – however anachronistic it might seem at first glance – the important medieval tradition of the finding in the early fourth century AD of the True Cross by Saint Helena, mother of the first Christian emperor, Constantine.17 As for prophet Raimundo’s cross, it was solidly planted between 1910 and 1915 beside a stream and thought by the Indians to be miraculous. In 1971 that cross was found buried under 50 centimetres of earth. The circumstances of its discovery were deemed extraordinary. The way an Austrian Salesian father in Santa Isabel told me the episode indicated he thought those circumstances to be outright miraculous. The Salesians duly uprooted that cross and solemnly took it to a series of communities – in a way strongly reminiscent of what happened to the little statue of Our Lady of Aparecida. On Good Friday 1971 Raimundo’s cross was set up inside the door of the Iauaretê church. The message was clearly that the indigenous cross was but a prefiguration of the (True Catholic) Cross the missionaries were bringing. Moreover, it seems that the arms of the cross were cropped – a telling if unconscious symbolic treatment – to fit the measurements of its new emplacement. Later, the Salesians decided to set it up in a separate chapel outside the church. Still later, they decided to set up another cross and try to erect it where Raimundo’s original had once stood. At that point, no one any longer knew the correct spot. However, as people



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were trying to set up the new cross, they found out – a prodigy once again – that the foundations of the original one were just below their feet. Those are the terms in which the Austrian missionary told me the story. In short, a Catholic topos was used to interpret and encompass an Indigenous appropriation of a Catholic symbol, in a fertile and apparently unending dialogue of appropriations and counter-appropriations. Allow me to talk about other counter-appropriations. Many of the ritual and political regalia of Upper Rio Negro societies found their way to a small but very interesting museum in Manaus, kept by the Salesian nuns.18 This fact had been known for quite some time by the Indigenous people of the Upper Rio Negro. The reasons for the missionaries keeping the very ritual artifacts that they asked Indians to surrender, burn down, or abandon in the first place must have seemed mystifying to the Indians. Hadn’t they taught that these were objects from the Devil? Some were also outraged at there being an entrance fee for them to see their artifacts, a practice that was soon relinquished. It was only in 2005, however, that, spurred by a growing sense of heritage, a delegation of the Federation of Indigenous Organizations of the Rio Negro (Federação das Organizações Indígenas do Rio Negro, FOIRN), the paramount organization of Indigenous people of the Rio Negro, descended on the museum in Manaus and asked for restitution. They were backed by both the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and by an important NGO, Instituto Socioambiental.The Salesian headquarters in Rome authorized the restitution of 108 such objects (G. Andrello, personal communication, 2008) which were subsequently repatriated with unforeseen and somewhat terrifying developments.19

Regimes of Religion The above discussion should not induce us to understand folk and official Catholicism as equivalent regimes, raiding each other’s fields. That, I think, would amount to an utter misunderstanding of the differences between the two. Official Catholicism is a religion of sin, and sin is essentially a distance from God. Lack is the keyword of such a religion. As Marshall Sahlins (1996) has suggested, it is a cosmology of incompleteness. Furthermore, it is a centralized institution that is allowed to regulate every realm of people’s lives, as if such discipline were important to God. It is vigilant over

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interpretations, deviations, and heresies. It can cast people out, and it may refuse to baptize and to give absolution. Popular Catholicism in the Amazon might be understood as a very different regime, one that instead of distance and sin, emphasizes close proximity, and the direct interest of God, Our Lady, and the saints not in discipline but in people’s minute worries: a lost key to one’s motorcycle, one’s children’s prospects. It encompasses people rather than casting them out. It brings them into its fold; it puts them in charge of festivals and of tending to domestic images (statues). It also encompasses all kinds of sects, as it does not distinguish between orthodox and heterodox doctrines. As against a religion of incompleteness, it is a religion of adjunction and aggregation. Thus, official Catholicism manifests itself in this story by the control it tries to exert: a benign control such as the letter Father Reginaldo put into the boat of the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida reporting the “true story” of its origin; or a more imperious control such as the bishop’s sequestering of the statue in Barcelos and its disappearance from the public eye. In contrast, popular Catholicism mimics the flow of the river and its affluents: as the Santinha descended, all kinds of accretions were made to its story; different origins were assigned to it, with different versions being equally acceptable and none gaining full authority.20

Social and Spiritual Geography Recall the uncertainty about where the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida was supposed to have first appeared. Social geography is significant here. What places, what stretches of the Negro, the Tiquié, and the Içana do people from the Middle Rio Negro actually know? Not everyone has been to the capital of the municipality: Santa Isabel for the left bank and, downriver, Barcelos for the right bank. It is an odd administrative division, for people in villages that face each other on the two sides of the Rio Negro actually travel in different directions when it comes to registering children and collecting pensions. Knowing the river beyond that largely depends on one’s generation, gender, and occupation. Children and youngsters today tend to know the villages or towns where their grandparents and close relatives are living. Marriage is virilocal, at least for a time, and women will know the villages in which they were reared. As land access for



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agriculture in the rural areas is not an issue and is freely available provided one gets the almost nominal permission from the community leader, people change their abode with relative ease within the region. Fishermen are supposed to know very intimately and in detail every island and every site of the river within their fishing area, which is essentially local. Young or unmarried men will try their hand at some extractive activity such as capturing cardinals, a highly sought after ornamental fish, or collecting piassava, an older extractive activity that still brings in some revenue and has survived even after rubber, Brazil nuts, balata, sorva, and chicle collapsed. The heyday of the extractive economy is definitely gone, however, and with it the three-centuries old practice of “descending” Indigenous peoples. The 1970s were probably the last time that scores of Baniwa, Tukano, Tuyuka, Pira-Tapuyas, and other upriver Indians were talked or lured (or even outright kidnapped) into going down to the Middle Rio Negro to replenish its extractive workforce. Although such work could be seen as seasonal, resettlement would often become permanent. Hence, people in the Santa Isabel municipality today are to a large extent the progeny of those so-called descended Indians from upriver. The village of Espírito Santo, for one, is mostly inhabited by descendants of Baniwa from upriver. The elders still speak Baniwa, which their children claim to understand. Nevertheless, most adults have adopted the old regional lingua franca introduced by the Jesuits, the nheengatu. The grandchildren, in turn, speak Portuguese while claiming to understand some nheengatu. In other words, only very old people have had first-hand experience of life upriver, and very few people have ever had the means of going back upriver beyond São Gabriel to visit their long-lost kin. Going downriver to Manaus, in contrast, and working there for some time is quite common. Hence, upriver is unknown country to most people, even as the names of its villages and rivers are familiar. That the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida is deemed to have originated so far upriver, maybe even in Colombian territory, conjures a regional spiritual geography. One old man, whose parents were Baniwa, declared the statue had first appeared in Tunuí. Tunuí, on the mid-Içana, in Baniwa country, was Venancio Christu’s or Venancio Kamiko’s place. Nazaré on the Cubate River, an affluent of the Tiquié, in Baniwa territory, was also mentioned. Then there was a mention of Caruru,

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both the name of a Wanano community upriver from Iauaretê and another one further upriver in Colombia. There is a double mention of Querari, river or village, where there is a growing Cubeo community.21 What all these latter different places have in common is that they are all far upriver, on the border with Colombia or even within Colombian territory. Colombian territory is today a cultural reservoir for the Upper Rio Negrinos. Tukanoan-speaking groups from the Uaupés who surrendered their precious chests of plumed ornaments to the missionaries are counting on their Colombian neighbours for getting them back. The Tuyuka and Desana have already received ornaments from Colombia, while the Wanano and Tariano are considering a risky and expensive expedition to the Bará in order to trade gunshots for ritual ornaments (G. Andrello, personal communication, 2008). What I am suggesting here is that the attribution of the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida to a number of disparate origins in space reconnects it to various sources of ritual empowerment. What I feel most relevant here, the message of this story is that it gives evidence of a struggle for the appropriation of symbols on the Rio Negro in which the Catholic Church, a heretic sect, and Protestants – as much as local Indigenous people – are involved. There is a chasse-croisé going on: while missionaries of a post–Vatican II persuasion seek to emulate and incorporate “traditional” local rituals, Indigenous peoples try to appropriate the Cross, Christ, and other Christian symbols. Indigenization of Catholic modernity goes hand in hand with modernist Catholicization of Indigeneity. There is a somewhat cryptic homage to Marshall Sahlins in my choice of telling this story, and I might as well explain it now. A few years ago, Marshall told me as he gave me a volume of Anahulu (1992) that he considered that book to be his most important work: Anahulu deals with the history of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and was written in collaboration with archaeologist Patrick Kirch. Elsewhere, Marshall speaks of ascending from theory to the empirical. I take these statements, à tort ou à raison, to mean that our most lasting contribution as anthropologists might be – after all is said and done – data, fieldwork, and the stories they unveil. Just that.



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Notes 1 Fieldwork was carried out through PACTA , “Local Peoples, Agrobiodiversity and Associated Traditional Knowledge in Amazonia,” a joint Brazilian and French research program involving CNP q – Unicamp/IRD  – UR 200/Palos, no. 492693/2004-8 with grants from IRD , CNP q, ANR -Biodivalloc, and BRG, and with the collaboration of ACIMRN (Indigenous Communities of the Middle Rio Negro Association). Research authorization no. 139, Diário Oficial da União (04/04/2006). 2 Our Lady of Aparecida (Aparecida meaning “the one who appeared”) is the patron saint of Brazil, and her original statue itself is considered to work miracles. It was found in 1717, so the legend goes, by three fishermen in the Paraíba River, in southeastern Brazil. 3 According to Unesco 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, cultural spaces associated with practices and knowledge and felt to be part of people’s cultural heritage fall into the definition of what constitutes Intangible Cultural Heritage. At its national level, Brazil keeps a register of Intangible Cultural Heritage Spaces, along with other registers concerning celebrations and skills. The first such Cultural space to be registered in Brazil were the rapids of Ipanoré. 4 The couple in question were Jacinto Cruz, Pira-tapuia, and Eulalia Almeida, Tariana (Erivaldo Almeida, personal communication; Martini 2009). 5 As federal redistribution of tax money to municipalities and schools is proportional to its inhabitants and enrolled students, respectively, it is not unheard of that, whenever they can, municipalities may significantly inflate their numbers. 6 Although hallucinogenic yagé (Banisteriopsis caapi) was traditionally used by Indigenous societies on the Upper Rio Negro (see, e.g., S. Hugh-Jones 1979), its use seems to have declined. In the southwest Amazonian State of Acre, in contrast, it has gained terrain and legitimacy. Whether this is a result of the stronger control exercised by Salesians or not is hard to decide. Stephen Hugh-Jones also mentions dreams among the Barasana as a way to directly contact the He state (247). 7 The Rio Negro was from the seventeenth century on an extractive resource field for the colonists. Yet the main extraction at stake concerned manpower, as Indians were enslaved or lured into “descending” close to colonial establishments (Meira 2000). Rubber and piassava extraction up until very recent times followed the same pattern of recruiting labour upriver, although relocation would now be at a closer range.

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8 The Dom Bosco Salesians are a missionary and educational society founded by the Piedmontese John Bosco (later Saint John Bosco) and were recognized by the Vatican in 1873. 9 These data come from the Central Salesian Archives in Rome, particularly A8630609/1975 and A8630701. 10 It would be worth understanding why Salesians from the same Italian province appeared to be less successful among the Bororo in Mato Grosso and why Salesians from Ecuador were, at about the same time, giving full support to Indigenous movements such as the Shuars’. 11 Two centuries earlier, in 1759, Jesuits were expelled from Brazil on the charges that they did not adequately serve Portugal’s interests. They were suspected of having political plans of their own for the Amazon. They introduced a lingua franca in the region derived from an Indigenous language rather than bringing in Portuguese. 12 The website is archived at https://web.archive.org/ web/20090213173014/http://palavravivadedeus.com.br/livrogrande/ praia.htm. Although Deus can be both Latin and Portuguese for God, it was commonly understood that God had signed His name in Portuguese, and His linguistic affiliation did not seem to deserve any commentary. 13 A picture of this image was posted on his website, which is now archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20090215114817/http://palavravivadedeus.com.br/livrogrande/milagre.htm. 14 Messianic movements in the region have been extensively studied by Robin Wright in his doctoral dissertation and in numerous publications. Unless otherwise noted, he is my source of data on the topic. 15 Long before anthropologists took up that interpretation, an artistic (though ethnographically inspired) thematization of Indigenous cannibalism was submitted. Anthropophagy was introduced in the early 1920s by modernist writers, poets, and visual artists as an icon for Brazilian appropriation, digestion, and transformation of foreign art currents. 16 On that topic and the fickleness of Brazilian Indians’ conversion in the sixteenth century, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1993). 17 Fragments of the True Cross made for highly coveted and widely distributed relics all over Europe, and the legend of its finding was famously illustrated by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo. 18 On the history of this museum, see Andrello and Ferreira (2015). 19 Repatriation was followed by the death of Erivaldo, a leader of FOIRN closely involved with the process. Coincidently, he was the son of the elderly couple from Iauaretê who donated the image of the Santinha. The young anthropologist who followed the events and reported them, André Martini, also died shortly after.



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20 I have similarly pointed to a disparity of regimes in the expansion of orixá-worshipping religions from West Africa to Brazil. The adherence to “traditional” ritual behaviour in the New World obscures profound organizational differences. West African orixá-worship, coterminous with lineages or towns, turned into a universalistic religion in Brazil; conversely, the Catholicism adhered to by returnees from Brazil to the West Coast of Africa was understood to be, in West African fashion, exclusive to that community (Carneiro da Cunha 1985). 21 I wish to very warmly thank Geraldo Andrello and Alicia Rolla who spotted all these places on the map for me.

7 The Past Is Old, the Future Is Traditional: Ircenrraat, the DOT, and the Inventiveness of Tradition Ann Fienup-Riordan I never heard the word “culture” used in southwest Alaska thirty years ago – today it is on everyone’s lips. Conscious culture is the trademark of the new millennium in Alaska as elsewhere, requiring effort to preserve and reproduce past practices and defend them against assimilative pressures. In this struggle, as Marshall Sahlins (2000b: 196) says so well, “the continuity of indigenous cultures consists in the specific ways they change.” This essay explores one such struggle – a debate over road-building – as an example of what Sahlins (2000b: 192) and others have called “culturalism,” that is, the self-conscious, deliberate use of identity, culture, and heritage in gaining recognition of a distinctive way of life. The Arctic generally has attracted scholars most interested in the ingenuity of Inuit survival and the concept of culture as adaptive response. Much less attention has been given to local understandings of heritage and how people interpret and use their own history. The emphasis here will be on cultural creativity rather than ecological fit. It is particularly important to give Arctic flesh to the bones of this argument, as so often non-Native understandings of the Far North have been reduced to the description of subsistence cycles. In 2005 the Alaska Department of Transportation (DOT) began plans to build a 15-mile highway on the Bering Sea coast to connect several Nelson Island villages. The route DOT chose ran directly over the homes of ircenrraat (other-than-human persons) also believed to



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Figure 7.1.  Nelson Island place names. Drawn by Michael Knapp.

be resident on Nelson Island. Not surprisingly, community members voiced concerns about this project. While invoking shared traditions, however, Nelson Islanders do not all come to the same conclusions. Yet if we listen closely, their public conversations provide a modern means for the traditional ends of consensus building and recognition of wider social responsibilities (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2).

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Figure 7.2.  Qasginguaq, June 2009. Photo by Ann Fienup-Riordan.

Tracks on the Tundra The low, windswept tundra of southwest Alaska’s Bering Sea coast presents a deceptively inhospitable face to the first-time visitor. In fact, the land and sea abound with seals, walrus, beluga, herring, salmon, halibut, ptarmigan, geese, ducks, berries, and greens gathered during the annual harvesting cycle. The Yup’ik people of Nelson Island – living in the villages of Toksook Bay, Tununak, and Nightmute, with a combined population of about 1,100 – are able to fill their freezers and storehouses with more than 600 pounds per person of subsistence resources. Because they use powerboats, rifles, and snowmobiles, they must earn money for equipment and fuel by working within the local wage economy. People’s success at harvesting animals is directly tied to their ability to harvest cash. Today money is increasingly hard to come by, and hunting and fishing are often difficult to afford. I first lived in Toksook Bay during the 1970s, doing fieldwork and trying to learn the Yup’ik language (Fienup-Riordan 1983). Since then I have lived in Anchorage and continued to work as a cultural anthropologist in southwest Alaska. Through the early 1990s, the



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projects I undertook were largely of my own making – a missionary history, a book on Yup’ik cosmology, a harvest disruption study, and a book on the popular representation of Alaska Natives in the movies (Fienup-Riordan 1986, 1991, 1994, 1995). Beginning in 1992, Yup’ik community members have invited me to help them with projects of their own, and since 1999 most of my work has been carried out in collaboration with the Calista Elders Council, the primary heritage organization for the Yup’ik region (Fienup-Riordan 1996, 2005a, 2005b, 2007; Fienup-Riordan and Rearden 2012; Meade and Fienup-Riordan 2005; Rearden and Fienup-Riordan 2011, 2013, 2014). In February 2006 I travelled to Toksook for the first time in three years. My excuse was the annual Kassiyuk (Dance Festival), but visiting friends was just as important. During my absence Toksook had built a new community hall, a fifteen-bed subregional clinic, an airfield, three wind generators, and a tank farm, and it had added high-speed Internet access. One project still in the works was a system of roads that the Alaska State Department of Transportation (DOT) proposed to connect the island’s villages as well as the summer fish camp of Umkumiut, three miles west of Toksook Bay. This intervillage gravel highway would be the first of its kind in southwest Alaska. In winter trucks travel an ice highway between the regional centre of Bethel and nearby villages, but otherwise boats, planes, and snowmobiles provide the only means of transportation between the region’s fifty-six villages. When I arrived at Toksook, I headed for Paul and Martina John’s house and received a warm welcome. Before I could take off my coat, their daughter, Jolene, guided me into the back bedroom to show me something on the computer. On screen I saw a mixture of human and animal tracks in an area of bright white snow. Orange tape had been staked around them to keep people from adding their tracks to the ones in the photo. Jolene told me that her uncle, Joe Henry, who lived in a house 300 yards from the Johns, had discovered the unusual tracks in newly fallen snow outside his house. The tracks showed paw prints, which changed back and forth from human to animal tracks, then eventually disappeared. Many Nelson Islanders visited the site to see the tracks, and photographs were later published in the Bethel newspaper, the Tundra Drums (Active 2006). Many believed that the tracks had been made by ircenrraat,

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small people who live in hilly areas and can appear in either animal or human form.

Ircenrraat and Other Persons The implicit distinction between humans and animals in Western thought belies the complex relationships between numerous categories of persons in the Yup’ik view of the world. Many understand the world as inhabited by a variety of persons, including human persons, non-human persons (animals), and extraordinary or otherthan-human persons, such as ircenrraat (plural), cingssiiget (small persons with pointed heads), and qununit (seal people). Appearances are often deceiving. A man encountered on the tundra might be an ircenrraq (singular) in human form. Wolf cubs playing in the grass might be ircenrraat in animal incarnation. Ircenrraat are believed to possess a mixture of traits requiring special treatment. Like human and animal persons, they possess both mind and awareness and, so, merit careful treatment and respect. Ircenrraat are said to live underground and are still sometimes encountered. Stories of those who have visited them describe a world both like and unlike its human counterpart, where a year is experienced as a single day. Although non-human persons often have special traits, they are not considered to be supernatural but rather part of the world that may or may not be experienced. Many detailed accounts describe encounters with such persons. Yup’ik parents continue to tell these stories so that young people will know how to act if they have such an experience. Although sightings of ircenrraat are not as common as they were in the past, their tracks and footprints are still found, along with an occasional tool or piece of clothing. People also sometimes hear the singing, stamping, and thumping of ircenrraat, proof that they are still present in the land. In the past, when the earth was thin (nuna-gguq mamkitellruuq tamani, from nuna, “land,” and mamkite, “flat object that is thin”), encounters with unusual persons were more common. According to the late Brentina Chanar (born 1912) of Toksook Bay (interview, 4 February, 1991): Kegluneq said that her grandmother used to say that long ago when the land was thin, things like that used to appear …



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When it was thin and when it freezes, you know things going on top of it become resonant. You could also easily hear people walking outside. At that particular time, apparitions became numerous, what they call carayiit [literally, “terrible, fearsome things”]. So when the soil was thin skinned, those footsteps would wake them up. Ircenrraat are the most commonly reported of these extraordinary persons. Brentina Chanar stated that they appear as ordinary people. Although she had not seen them herself, she had heard their songs – proof of their reality. Others say they are small people, two to three feet high, and as early as 1899 the Smithsonian ethnographer Edward Nelson (1983 [1899]: 480) described them as dwarves. Occasionally a person encounters ircenrraat as yuut (people) and later sees them as wolves or foxes or other small mammals. At other times humans encounter wolves or foxes who later reveal themselves as ircenrraat. When people encounter an ircenrraq, they may at first perceive it as a normal person. Although ircenrraat can appear anywhere, they generally prefer hilly areas which some people believe are their houses, including specific places like the hilltop knob known as Qasginguaq, about 5 miles northeast of Toksook. The name “Qasginguaq” translates as “place that looks like a qasgi or communal men’s house,” referring to the belief that the knob is the semi-subterranean home of ircenrraat. Many Nelson Islanders revere the mountain for this reason. Although people usually encounter ircenrraat in the human world, some stories tell how a person travelling in the hills happens on the window or door to the world of the ircenrraat. That person might look through that opening for what seems like only a moment but it is actually much longer. The late Frances Usugan (born 1915) of Toksook Bay related (on 22 July 1985) how her older brother, Cyril Chanar (born 1909), heard the songs of the ircenrraat while they were celebrating in their underground qasgi within Qasginguaq. What were those ircenrraat in the times through which we came? My brother, Cyril Chanar, from Qasginguaq he heard drums and singing.

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And when winter came, during the time they had Kevgiq [Messenger Feast], they had songs that were from the ircenrraat. It is said that when one hears ircenrraat singing like that, they always learn them right away. This event occurred when Cyril Chanar was a young man in the early 1930s. Nelson Islanders still recall his experience and the songs he learned there. A person might also visit ircenrraat in their homes, where the human visitor could see his hosts as people. The visitor’s ability to return to the human world depended on his reception. Frances Usugan (on 22 July 1985) shared a story of a nukalpiaq (successful hunter and provider) who was taken into the world of the ircenrraat. He was wearing a patchwork parka made of different animal skins. When the ircenrraat asked about them, he said that each represented the catch of a relative. Worried that the nukalpiaq was a powerful man with a large family, the ircenrraat decided to release him. Three doors led out of their underground qasgi, and he was instructed to exit through the middle door back to the earth’s surface. Had he gone through the lower door, he would have remained underground, while the upper door led into the sky. Some people say that if a person brings something back from the ircenrraat, such as a tool or piece of clothing, it will bring good luck to its owner. Possession of the hunting tool of an ircenrraq, for example, will make that person a better hunter. People may also acquire good fortune by exchanging something with an ircenrraq. Eddie Alexie of Togiak told the story of a man who killed a caribou and then fell asleep. Two people (who were actually ircenrraat) appeared to him and said that they wanted to trade for his catch. When he awoke, his caribou was gone, but the following spring he was able to catch beluga whales, which had avoided him in the past but were an animal form that ircenrraat sometimes assume. Many accounts of encounters with ircenrraat contain the implicit moral that if animals are treated poorly, their “persons” would call the offender to account. The late Billy Lincoln (born 1906) of Toksook Bay related (on 21 July 1985) the well-known story of a man’s encounter with wolves (actually ircenrraat), who took him into their



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underground world. When they finally allowed him to leave, he was told to somersault four times. Sitting up he saw that he had emerged in front of his house, but everything there had become old in his absence. Although he had only experienced a single day with the ircenrraat, he had actually been gone an entire year. Ircenrraat might also take the form of killer whales, and rules forbid hunting or injuring these whales for that reason. Anyone who did so doomed an immediate family member to die. According to Frances Usugan (as told on July 1985): Those down there, the ones they refer to as Kalukaat, at the bend, when we go around them, the ones high up there, they say that they are ircenrraat. And these killer whales, they say they are ircenrraat. And down there at the bend, when a person hears them, after they make kayak sounds, the killer whales resubmerge from near the shore, going out to sea. These are the people of Kalukaat who make kayak sounds as ones who are preparing, even though they have not seen anything, the killer whales resubmerge going out, from near the shore here. Finally, ircenrraat are believed to reveal people’s future, as in this account by Brentina Chanar (from 4 February 1991): Those ircenrraat revealed the future of the village that they will experience later on. When we used to stay at Nunakauyak [the present site of Toksook Bay] and it was fall, when it got dark, your father would go out and come in and say, “There beyond Qemqeng, two lights

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were travelling very fast and then disappeared. And now there is a flashlight coming down on this side of Nialruq!” But when we went out to check, we did not see it. And sometimes, from the end of Qemqeng, we would hear something roaring. And across from us there would be lights, but nothing would happen to us. And now Ski-dos make light going across there and coming down from Nialruq. I used to suspect that [ircenrraat] revealed what was to be and roaring Ski-dos approaching! … It was probably them, revealing what people will do, the coming generation. Indeed, the lights Brentina Chanar observed along the trail leading down from Qasginguaq may have revealed a future yet to come.

Building Roads and Building Consensus on Nelson Island The weekend dance festival drew to a close. As other guests and I prepared to leave, bad weather closed in, and planes did not fly for the next week. On Monday morning I was at the Johns’, listening to casual conversation around the kitchen table. The phone rang, and to my surprise it was a woman from the Department of Transportation asking me to help them out. She said that they needed me to act as their expert to solve the “problem of Qasginguaq.” I told her that I would try to help but that I had no expert capacity or decisionmaking power in Toksook. I said I would visit the Nunakauyak Traditional Council office and see what I could learn. The “problem of Qasginguaq” revolved around the proposed right-of-way and material site for the Nelson Island roadway. DOT engineers had designed the 15-mile road connecting Toksook and Nightmute to run right over Qasginguaq. Engineers also suggested that the knob’s abundant gravel near the proposed road would make an ideal material site, potentially providing gravel for the entire highway project, estimated to cost in excess of 50 million dollars. During summer 2005 field reconnaissance, Braund and Associates (2005a, 2005b) surveyed the right-of-way and identified the potential historic and prehistoric value of small rock structures on Qasginguaq, including three rock cairns and a circular stone structure. Further conversations with Nelson Islanders revealed that the cairns were recently constructed, probably by young people. David



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Hooper of Tununak reported that the stone circle was made by National Guardsmen during training exercises on Nelson Island. Nelson Islanders did not consider either of these structures, created from loose surface stones found on the hilltop, as historically or culturally significant. During discussions about these stone structures, however, it became apparent that while Nelson Islanders do not give them cultural significance, they do place considerable value on Qasginguaq itself. Prompted by their practical need to document the traditional significance that contemporary Nelson Islanders place on Qasging­ uaq before preceding with the Nelson Island roadway, DOT had tracked me down and given me a call. I knew all this before the phone call, as ircenrraat in general and Qasginguaq in particular had been the topic of many conversations during the previous week. I walked to the traditional council office, where I told Jolene John – who worked as the tribal administrator – about the call from DOT. She, in fact, had recommended that they contact me. I mentioned my reluctance to say anything to DOT unless it reflected community views. Jolene agreed and told me that a Toksook town meeting fortuitously was scheduled for that afternoon. She suggested putting Qasginguaq on the agenda, and made several announcements in Yup’ik over the CB radio to encourage community members as well as Nightmute people who had stayed overnight following the dance to attend the meeting. I was given permission to record the discussion, which was carried out in the Yup’ik language. More than forty men and a handful of women gathered at the new community hall. Elders sat at the back of the room, and middleaged men and women farther forward. Boys from the high school basketball team later filed in and took places in the front row, but said not a word. The presence of men and boys in this public space mirrored the past. Through the 1930s, boys lived and worked in the qasgi, where they received practical training from community elders as well as oral instruction, viewed as the moral foundation of a properly lived life. Qasgit (plural) continued to be used into the 1950s. With the introduction of single-family dwellings and formal education, however, they were no longer the primary places where men lived and worked together, educating their younger generation. The town hall meeting evoked this traditional context both in form and content. The community hall became “like a qasgi”

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when elders and young people gathered there, and this referent grounded everything they said. At the outset Toksook Bay Tribal Council President David Tim emphasized that DOT would respect the opinions of community members. He stated, “Those who are working on [the road] are relying on us because we know things from the past; they do not want to do something without having asked us, since we know the route of the road. Because they are doing that, we Yupiit [Yup’ik people] are the determining factors.” Community members, in turn, deferred to elders present at the meeting and gave their advice priority. Testimony confirmed residents’ views on the continued presence of ircenrraat on Nelson Island and their close association with Qasginguaq. Mark John stated, “Since I have come to exist, they have mentioned Qasginguaq many times. And when I was able to go by dog team, whenever I went near it, I used to think about it being the land of the ircenrraat. If an area close to Qasginguaq is devastated, it might be disturbing, knowing the ways of our ancestors. It is included in stories, and Yupiit know that Qasginguaq up there as a significant landmark.” Toksook Bay elder James Charlie agreed: Our ancestors, before we started talking about God or heaven, said that a person who dies goes to a designated place here in Nelson Island. They go to Kalukaat and also farther up from Tununak, and so they go there and become ircenrraat. And that Qasginguaq, just like Mark said, it is like a “spiritual site” or a “sacred site.” From time immemorial our ancestors have said that not only Kalukaat but also some places on the side of the mountain are the lands of ircenrraat. Toksook Bay Traditional Chief Paul John (born 1928) also identified ircenrraat with killer whales, as Frances Usugan had twenty years before: “They say the Kalukaat are the original place of the killer whales. They call the rocks on the steep part on top of our mountain Kalukaat. They have been the land of the ircenrraat for centuries. They are killer whales … and they sometimes make thundering sounds when something is going to happen.” Camilius Tulik of Nightmute agreed: “When they had a qasgi in Umkumiut, they prohibited us from bothering those killer whales. When they were talking about ircenrraat at Qasginguaq, they also talked about those



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killer whales. Those black killer whales belong to Qasginguaq.” Thomas Jumbo, also from Nightmute, described the door by which killer whales disappear into the land: “There is a door just this side of Ulurruk. So these killer whales are ircenrraat. Even though they submerge near the edge of the shore, they go in [to the land]; that is their house, it is their village.” During the meeting consensus emerged that Qasginguaq was a traditional landmark and culturally valuable site and should be protected. Participants also recognized the importance of the new road. Camilius Tulik stated: I have lived in this place called Nelson Island ever since I was small and nowhere else. All of us here on Nelson Island know and have heard about these they call ircenrraat. Whatever we are going to use, they say that ircenrraat use them first. So what [ircenrraat] pointed out is indeed true. But I am in support of [the road]. This road will be used by those who come after us here on Nelson Island. Paul John agreed: “That road may be okay if the bottom [of Qasginguaq] is not destroyed, if they bypass Qasginguaq.” Mark John added, “If they disturb the land, I do not want them to take gravel from close [to Qasginguaq]. I want them to take gravel for the road from far away.” Again, James Charlie voiced his support of this position, noting that the road is important, but that Yup’ik ways must also be preserved. It would be okay if the road could be on this side [of the mountain]. But the ones who know about it should be asked about how far from [Qasginguaq] it should be built, I think that will be better. This road will undoubtedly help us but our ways should not be sacrificed, especially our traditional values. It is possible to [build the road], so instead of getting gravel from the top of [Qasginguaq], it might be better to get it farther away from it, keeping in mind our ancestors. Camilius Tulik concluded, “I wanted to talk to you about how we will all use that road. At Nightmute they said that if they are going to take [materials] from near Qasginguaq, it should not be close. If

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we work on it collectively, we will do it properly. It will be fine if it is done like that, by talking about it like this beforehand. So write to those people saying that is the way they want to do it.” Having confirmed (1) that Qasginguaq was a culturally significant site and (2) that the new road should be built without disturbing Qasginguaq, discussion turned to the question of how far the road should be built from Qasginguaq. Participants discussed the matter at length and agreed that the road should be built as far away as possible on the downhill slope away from Qasginguaq and no closer than 1,500 feet from the perimeter of the knob, located approximately 2,000 feet from the hilltop. Finally, Charlie Moses of Toksook Bay suggested a possible new material site behind Qasginguaq: That future road that will come from Nightmute will go by in front of Qasginguaq. It will go inland when it nears Qalulleq [River], and it will cross [the stream] toward its source. From that point, they could go to that material site starting from its inland location. It will be better if it went that way. Instead of getting [road material] from near Qasginguaq, they could go to that material site up there when they start to take rocks. It could be like that. Phillip Moses agreed with Charlie Moses’ recommendation: “That small hill at the source of Qalulleq will be filled with rocks. That hill just at the source of Qalulleq is not small. It is under Qasginguaq, down from the proposed road. If it has good rocks, even if it is used, it will not be missed if it is gone. But it will be a reason to be grateful.” Camilius Tulik concluded: “So if we come to one mind [in agreement], it will be ideal.”

Traditional Landscapes from Contemporary Yup’ik and Non-Yup’ik Points of View Although discussion at the Toksook town hall meeting clarifies some points, much was left unsaid. Building consensus regarding Qasginguaq was as complex as building the road itself.



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People agreed that Qasginguaq is a location possessing longstanding value. It is the site of past encounters with ircenrraat, who many still believe make it their home. The ancestors of present-day Nelson Islanders, including the late Cyril Chanar, saw and heard ircenrraat at Qasginguaq, and their encounters are still widely known. Contemporary Nelson Islanders, including Traditional Chief Paul John, have observed lights and other activity by ircenrraat at Qasginguaq from a distance. Today, looking northeast from Toksook Bay, Qasginguaq appears on the landscape in the same form as it has for centuries. It is an easily recognizable knob, highly visible from the village. Travellers have piled surface rocks into several small cairns and low structures, but no one has dug below its surface into the ircenrraat’s underground home. Contemporary recognition of ircenrraat as active agents present on Nelson Island provides strong evidence of the continued relevance of Yup’ik understandings of personhood. All persons – human, non-human, and other-than-human – are believed to possess awareness and merit respect. A Yup’ik adage captures this shared personhood: “Ella-gguq allamek yuituq” (The world, they say, is occupied by persons and no others). This qanruyun (instruction) eloquently underscores both the common kinship between humans as well as the common personhood of all creatures. Although most Nelson Islanders share a common view of personhood, they come to different conclusions. Some oppose roadbuilding on the island, not only because of negative effects on the land and those who live within it but also its potential impacts on human communities. The new road may lead to consolidation of services, closure of schools and clinics in Tununak and Nightmute, and forced reliance on centralized facilities at Toksook. Most Toksook residents oppose such centralization, for good cultural reasons. Toksook has a Yup’ik immersion program in its elementary school, and residents actively support use of the Yup’ik language in many contexts. Tununak and Nightmute do not have Yup’ik immersion programs in their schools, and their young people increasingly speak English. Although near neighbours geographically, the three Nelson Island villages have very different visions of themselves and their futures. Toksook, for one, prefers independence in the name of cultural survival.

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Toksook residents recently have been joined in their resistance to the road project by representatives of the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Nelson Island is part of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, in which more than a million ducks and half-amillion geese breed annually (US Fish and Wildlife Service 2002). Refuge managers are concerned that the traffic and noise of road construction and use will cause environmental damage in the birds’ sensitive nesting grounds. Yup’ik resistance to USFWS regulation of waterfowl hunting is long-standing and well documented (Fienup-Riordan 1999). In brief, non-Native wildlife biologists tend to view the birds as scarce resources requiring management, whereas Yup’ik hunters view them as persons who can legitimately be hunted anytime they present themselves. Many Nelson Islanders believe that like all animals, birds observe what is done to their carcasses and communicate with others of their kind. Whereas non-Native biologists advocate limited hunting as a remedy for declining bird populations, Yup’ik hunters continue to view the relationship between humans and animals as collaborative reciprocity by which animals give themselves to humans in response to respectful treatment as persons (albeit non-human) in their own right. Mike Uttereyuk, Sr (interview, March 1995) of Scammon Bay described hunting for geese north of his village: After we killed lots in one year, there would be a lot more returning the next year. That was how it was … Today, since we don’t catch as much as we used to, the population of geese has declined. The amount of geese we kill is usually replaced. If we killed lots, they would be replaced by many more when they returned. That was how it was! Because white men are keeping a close eye on them … they are making the goose population decrease. Uttereyuk’s conclusion – that the recent population decline is the direct result of limited harvests – highlights a fundamental conflict between the Western scientific view of geese and that held by many contemporary Yupiit. Wildlife managers maintain that overhunting and overharvesting are major factors contributing to the decline of goose populations along the Bering Sea coast (Sedinger et al. 1993). For Uttereyuk and many of his generation overharvesting by Yup’ik hunters is not to blame but rather the limited harvests that insult the geese, causing them to go elsewhere.



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In the context of this long-standing debate, it is remarkable for some Nelson Islanders to join forces with non-Native refuge personnel. It is, however, a pragmatic partnership. In choosing to work with the biologists Nelson Islanders are not forsaking their traditional view of personhood but accepting support from non-Native conservationists whose practical concerns overlap theirs. On the other side of the debate are Nelson Islanders (especially Nightmute residents) for whom the new road will halve the miles to open water for seal hunting and fishing – traditional activities performed today with the help of modern tools. Not only will the new road cut fuel bills (gas is up to $6.00 a gallon in the village), the sale of gravel (located on village corporation land) and the use of local labour during road construction will help the village economy. Residents assume that the state will contract with locals for road maintenance as well. This position does not negate belief in or disrespect for ircenrraat, as Camilius Tulik reasoned, “Ircenrraat never told us not to.”

A Person’s Mind Is Powerful The emphasis above has been on the broad conceptualization of personhood to include other-than-human persons. According to this view, human persons also require careful treatment. To guide people in their relations with each other, the Yupiit codified detailed qanruyutet (instructions) for the culturally appropriate living of life (Fienup-Riordan 2005a). Although the multitude of qanruyutet took a lifetime to learn, they can be thought about in terms of a small number of basic rules flowing directly from the Yup’ik concept of a powerful mind. The foremost admonition was for a person to act with compassion, sharing with and helping those in need. “Those who share,” they say, “are given another day.” Second, people were taught to control their own thoughts and feelings, avoiding private conflict and public confrontation. As they say, “Braid your anger in your hair so that it will not become loose.” These two admonishments  – to act with compassion and restraint  – reflect neither selfless altruism nor passive acquiescence. Rather, both are a direct response to the Yup’ik understanding of the positive and negative powers of the human mind. To act with compassion elicits the gratitude of those one helps and brings the power of their minds to bear on one’s future success. To act selfishly or in anger, on the other hand, injures the minds of one’s fellows and

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produces dangerous negative effects. This immediate and tangible reciprocity is at the core of Yup’ik social and emotional life. Theresa Moses elaborated (on 5 June 1995) this relational morality and the power of a person’s emotional response: They say a person’s gratitude is powerful. They say their feelings of humiliation are also powerful. They taught us how to use discretion among our fellows and try not to say things that might hurt their feelings. They’d say that a person’s feelings of gratitude and humiliation were very strong. When someone does something that makes me very grateful, sometimes the only thing I can do is to hope for their well-being. Sometimes my feelings are so strong, I weep. Since a person’s gratitude is truly powerful, his feelings of humiliation are also profound. When we were offended, instead of becoming haughty, we were taught to have self-control. The view of society Theresa reflects is fundamentally relational rather than individualistic. A person is not first and foremost an individual who “relates” to others as a secondary activity. Rather, a Yup’ik person comes into the world as part of a complex web of kinship, including both human and non-human persons. One always considers these others and, for better or worse, reaps the consequences. The deference and respectful treatment of fellow community members that were the defining characteristics of the Toksook town hall meeting reflect this view. Decision making on Nelson Island was in the past and continues today to be consensus based. No outside expert can resolve issues for Nelson Islanders, but public discussion can facilitate coming to practical agreement in a respectful manner.

The Future Is Traditional The Toksook town hall meeting mirrors “culturalism” worldwide. Elders today embody past authority, talking in a new venue about traditional values that continue to animate relations between people, animals, and the land. Their efforts represent “a permutation of older forms and relationships made appropriate to novel situations” (Sahlins 1999c: 408). In southwest Alaska, as elsewhere, local differentiation and expressions of cultural distinctiveness have accompanied global integration and homogenization. Sahlins (399) argues



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persuasively against “the easy functional dismissal of people’s claims to cultural distinction (the so-called invention of tradition) and for the continued relevance of such distinctions (the inventiveness of tradition).” Nelson Islanders would agree with him. The elders’ vigorous speech regarding both ircenrraat and Qasginguaq is much more than backward-looking conservatism or nostalgia for the past. Their oratory, both “authentic” and “innovative,” displays a new self-consciousness and increased awareness of how they and their descendants are both like and unlike the encapsulating kass’aq (non-Native) majority, a dialectic of similarity and difference that is the hallmark of every “living tradition” (Sahlins 1999c: 411). Stressing the importance of holding onto one’s traditions, and working together “with one mind,” their contemporary narrative references to the past are active efforts to shape the future – a future in which they envision Yup’ik traditions as playing an important part. One final irony is noteworthy in this regard, testament to the complicated roles we anthropologists increasingly play. Following the Toksook town hall meeting, DOT asked me to write a report clarifying what Nelson Islanders had said. If Qasginguaq had cultural significance, they needed to know before moving ahead with their project. I wrote the report on behalf of the Nunakauyak Traditional Council. Council members were hopeful that what elders had shared would result in the designation of Qasginguaq as a Traditional Cultural Property (TCP) under the federal register. Such a designation – to date only bestowed twice in Alaska – would protect it in perpetuity from road building and future development projects. The value they placed on Qasginguaq could only translate into its designation as a Traditional Cultural Property if the DOT had that information in black and white. Using elders’ testimony I was able to make a strong case for the continued cultural significance of Qasginguaq. DOT presented the report to the Alaska State Department of History and Archaeology, and Qasginguaq was, in fact, declared eligible as a Traditional Cultural Property, the first step in the designation process. This was good news to Nelson Islanders, who wanted Qasginguaq protected, and to the DOT, which wanted to build the road. Once the site’s eligibility was established, DOT was required to treat it as a fully designated Traditional Cultural Property. DOT could now move forward with their project, which had been on hold while the status of Qasginguaq was

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in limbo. Declaring Qasginguaq eligible as a Traditional Cultural Property in effect paved the way for the new road. Nelson Islanders’ decision would be respected: If the road were built, Qasginguaq would be protected. In the state and federal regulatory process, the future is Tradition, writ large. In the end, the Toksook town hall meeting and its aftermath provides one of numerous examples of cultural revitalization and self-awareness. While many predicted that globalization would put an end to distinctive traditions, instead Indigenous people all over the globe have sought to appropriate the world in their own terms (Sahlins 2000b: 192). In southwest Alaska as elsewhere, expressions of cultural distinctiveness have grown up alongside increased global integration. For all their new connectedness – a state-ofthe-arts clinic, Internet access, direct air service to Anchorage – the continued relevance of traditional admonitions, many feel, cannot be denied. As Sahlins notes, the contemporary emphasis on traditional values reflects both ethnonationalism and political activism among numerous Indigenous peoples, including the Yupiit. Elders like Paul John and Camilius Tulik have strong political agendas, seeking not merely to revive selected practices but to vindicate them after a century of dismissal and condemnation. Here again Yup’ik elders are not unique but rather join Indigenous peoples worldwide who selfconsciously counterpoise their traditions “to the forces of Western imperialism … not merely to mark their identity but to seize their destiny” (Sahlins 2000b: 163). The Toksook town hall meeting not only discussed specific traditions surrounding Qasginguaq, but also revived the creative context of Yup’ik oratory, providing a public space for elders to perform their traditional roles as speakers and teachers. This instrumental character was reflected not only in the content of what elders said, especially their persistent references to traditional values and ancestral ways, but the meeting’s public form. Gathering together and openly speaking about their past, elders were actively endeavouring to shape their future. Many cases of cultural revival are spearheaded by younger men and women who champion “tradition” at odds with parents who had “accommodated to the white man and internalized the latter’s reproaches” (Sahlins 2000b: 198). But in this case, tradition-bearing elders on Nelson Island are truly leading the charge, as they



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have retained both knowledge of their past and a passionate desire to communicate it. For them, as for Indigenous leaders elsewhere, “culture is not only a heritage, it is a project,” a demand for specific forms of modernity that can only be fulfilled if the next generation shares their view of the world, that is, their culture (200). Elders at the town hall meeting discussed their differences in a group setting, as was traditional, based on their own personal experience: “I tell what I know.” Like good “afterologists,” Sahlin’s (1999c: 404) term for postmodern, post-colonial, post-structuralist thinkers, they made no claims to completeness or to imparting the one true faith. Their sense of their own culture was neither essentialist nor bounded, and the emphasis was not on presenting a unified, homogeneous, systematic view (as in some instances of cultural revival and renewal). Elders met together to talk about their past. They described their own experiences and listened to others. Knowledge was not viewed as the property of particular individuals but a shared experience gained in one’s engagement with the world and with each other. Nelson Island elders continue to see themselves as living in a world of local, face-to-face relations radically different from the national and anonymous relations that characterize the non-Native world. They view the DOT’s Traditional Cultural Property designation as a means to an end, not an end in itself. In their world, compassionate personal relations, including talking to young people and to each other, are the real keys to cultural survival. Their words continue to have value. At the end of the town hall meeting, younger Nelson Islanders expressed their gratitude to the elders for what they had shared, thoughtfully remarking that someday in the future they would be the ones talking to the younger generation. In fact, the future is now. Over the last decade, regional organizations and programs have put increasing emphasis on community and regional gatherings where both elders and young people speak out. At these gatherings elders publicly discuss practices hidden from the view of a generation of younger Yupiit, and their oratory continues to have moral weight. Issues of environmental transformation continue to be subtly contested on the Bering Sea coast, where the Nelson Island road project promises to reshape landscape in unprecedented ways. What some non-Natives (and Yupiit) view as acceptable progress – “Ircenrraat never told us not to” – some Yupiit (and non-Natives)

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view as potentially dangerous disturbance of the habitations of other-than-human persons with whom they coexist in a sentient world. If state funding becomes available, the road will probably be built. Until then, community discussion will continue. The tracks under Joe Henry’s window provide local evidence that ircenrraat inhabit the world, and the actions of ircenrraat may affect those who encounter them. Nelson Islanders also take responsibility for ircenrraat. Ethical practices on Nelson Island continue to be conceived in terms of this larger social framework, including human and non-human persons. Community debate on the transformation of their landscape continues to be guided by a relational ethic all but invisible to US Fish and Wildlife Servies and Alaska’s Department of Transportation. This debate is neither about conservation, as understood by USFWS biologists, nor development, as defined by DOT. At the Toksook town hall meeting, men told stories of ircenrraat, not as history lessons but as evidence to remind fellow humans of their wider social responsibilities. Acknowledgments I am indebted to the Nunakauyak Traditional Council for permission to attend and record their town hall meeting, and to share the results of what I learned. Thanks to David Chanar of Toksook Bay for his translations of elders’ accounts. And special thanks to Alex Golub for the invitation to contribute to this volume in honour of the anthropologist and teacher I most respect and admire.

8 The Kafka Connection: Structure, Lifeworld, and the Cunning of History Jonathan Friedman Marshall Sahlins has been one of the few anthropologists and certainly the most celebrated to have continued the tradition of argument and scientific reason that has been in large part abandoned in recent years by so many intellectuals. The tradition, if I may use such a dangerous term, consists in finding structure in reality. All structure is underlying insofar as it is not obvious “to the most casual observer.” It takes a great deal of work to arrive at structural understanding, and even then it is always in the form of hypothesis that is contestable. This is the burden of true science, the unremitting knowledge that one may be wrong. It is only possible when scientists are brave enough to admit to being wrong, usually on the grounds that they can eventually develop a better understanding of the world in the long run. This is surely the core of scientific strategy in the most general sense, an elaboration of trial and error. And Lévi-Strauss would certainly agree, as Sahlins has himself revealed in an interview, when the former stated that of course structuralism ought to be applied to infrastructures and not merely to superstructures. “Just what is structuralism?” “Enfin,” Lévi-Strauss said, “c’est la bonne anthropologie” (Sahlins 2008e: 322). And the usage of the term, if it is to simply be “good anthropology,” refers to a notion of underlying reality, not immediately visible, that is constructed by the anthropologist to account for apparent reality, that is, reality as appearance. It assumes that structure refers to the relational properties of reality, properties that

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are non-empirical in the sense of visibility but quite real, as real as gravity. It is Sahlins’s fearless creativity that is the source of the profound contributions that have transformed the nature of anthropology during the past decades. There have been anti-structuralist movements in anthropology as in other disciplines, but in most cases structuralism has been understood in more culturally specific terms, as superstructure, the structure of representation, as a kind of determinism that seems distasteful to those intellectuals who feel hemmed in by what appear to be forces beyond their control, who long for freedom from all of that. Foucault, who was more of a structuralist than the poststructuralist he has posthumously come to be, is invoked in their vision of language as the totality of the real to be revolted against, even in theory, especially in theory. The paradigm here is Judith Butler (1990, 1993), who seems to see her work as a struggle against definitions and categories, against gender and even sex itself, since all there is, to simplify her approach, are performances, all the rest being externally imposed by the political forces in control of social categorization. There have been since the 1980s a spate of actor-oriented, ethnography-is-all, textualisms inspired by Paul Ricoeur, and new anthropologies or rather ethnographies, since anthropology includes theory that is to be rejected as just more folk-models. Some have seen this shift away from structuralist accounts and all explanation as an expression of another wave of individualization riding the crest of the larger wave of neo-liberalism. Structure, then, is not compatible with my freedom, so it must be banned with all other forms of systemic understanding. And into all of this has been inserted a culturalist globalization vogue borrowed from cultural and postcolonial studies that is totally unconcerned with the structures of real life and more concerned with moralizing statements about the progressive and even evolutionary nature of globalization itself, as opposed to those backward-looking anthropologists who still believe that there is a “local” reality to be understood in its own terms and that some people (dangerous reactionaries) actually defend. This is why globalization proponents have been so negative to global systemic attempts to come to grips with contemporary and historical realities. Is this not a process of the terminal individualization of social thought, what Bruce Kapferer refers to as “the retreat of the social” and here, paradoxically in the name of the global, when, following



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the great global war between diasporas and the nation-state we shall all be free (Appadurai 1996: 21–3)? For, according to Appadurai, “In the longer run, freed from the constraints of the nation form, we may find that cultural freedom and sustainable justice do not presuppose the uniform and general existence of the nation-state” (23). The argument proposed here is that the structural analysis of our own contemporary state- based realities is an important exercise that creates a needed distance from those realities while demonstrating a coherence in reality that is denied in much recent work. This is not a general coherence identical in each society, but the coherence of a family of related forms. This is also an initial effort in which I cannot do much more than suggest what seem to be the possible underlying logics and their particular manifestations. They imply a need for more ethnography, not an ethnography of segregated realities but one that strives to see the connections among disparate phenomena. The aim is to begin to understand the nature of political cultures of modern states and to understand these in their social contexts. There are not mere logics of bureaucracy, of state regulation, or of the formalities of governmentality, but rather of the practical forms of sociality involved in the exercise of state power. The latter are thoroughly cultural insofar as they reveal sets of specific properties that can be understood not only as aspects of particular power structures, but also of more general schemes of sociality. The work of Marshall Sahlins is crucial in the current exercise since he is foremost among those who have engaged the structures of political realities and the cultural logics of power, not least state power. His insistence on not reducing anthropological analysis to the voice of the Native, of maintaining an external perspective as well, invoking Bahktin’s notion of extopy (Sahlins 1997), is fundamental for the kind of analysis suggested here. My approach is initially savage or at least undisciplined insofar as I take certain event chains as the point of departure. Thus, the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands are paths to the understanding of the organization of the political field of that society that can be engaged in some form of Sahlins’s renowned “method of uncontrolled comparison” to shed light on the way in which different national political arenas can be understood as variants of one another. The “Kafka” in the title of this piece refers to that aspect of social life that makes structuralism

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possible, the fact that free will and intentionality are largely already constituted within cultural frames of reference, that is, they are specific and immediate to the actors who act on free will without their wills being free. This is the tragic aspect of social life in the formal sense: that we know what we are doing but we know little of why we are doing it, nor what our doing does. And in an age when structuralism has been all but eliminated we tend to find ourselves even more deeply embedded in schemes that we feel to be so much our own individual schemes and choices and even strategies, but that are in fact even more embedded in social determinism than in the golden age of the deconstruction of the subject. If we have free will but the will is not free, then we are likely to miss the way in which our own lives are bound up in larger structures and logics that we claim to be the products of our own intentionality. This is the true cunning of Reason and the very reason for the necessity of a structural anthropology or any anthropology that combines the phenomenology of the emic with the “view from afar.”

A Case Study A recent and extremely well-written book by Ian Buruma (2006) explores the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam and the threats made to Van Gogh’s friend and one-time co-worker, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Buruma does an excellent job of characterizing his own liberal and multicultural position as an intellectual who left the Netherlands as a young man to see a larger world, a positioning that is evident in his characterization of his country of birth as quaint and his own home town as bourgeois and boring – all as opposed to the cosmopolitan space that he adheres to today. It is important to know this since he endeavours at the same time to understand the intentionalities of the actors that he studies in this book. My experiment here consists in using this book, as well as a number of articles from several sources, as a basis for the description of events. I will then suggest that there is a structure to the field of this set of events, one that reveals what can be designated a political culture in transformation. I shall not follow Buruma’s presentation since I am not doing a text analysis, but shall use his material to arrive at a structure that accounts for the events he describes without doing violence to his story.1



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The Murder of Pim Fortuyn Pim Fortuyn was the son of a travelling salesman whom he despised, of a Catholic family in a Protestant town, a homosexual in a heterosexual world, a self-identified outsider in all ways, as he wrote in his autobiography. He became an academic, and was known as a Marxist sociologist. He specialized in being what might be called politically incorrect, and the latter is, of course, a litmus test of the structures of sociality and accepted social order in any society. He dressed extravagantly and he had a white Daimler. He was completely open about his homosexuality and, against what anti-racists would have expected of him, openly spoke of his relations with young Moroccan men. He became a very popular “outsider” politician with support from what might be called the “republican” left, the old culturally liberal, iconoclastic left for which the Netherlands was famous in the 1960s and 1970s. He was also popular with portions of the nationalistic right although he himself would never associate himself with the nationalist figures of Le Pen or Haider. He called for a moratorium on immigration in order to first make sure that the immigrants were fully integrated into Dutch society. His party became the most popular in the country just before he was murdered. His assassin was a vegan, who hated Fortuyn because he flaunted his furs and his luxurious style of consumption. The assassin came from a strongly Protestant and puritan background, and his “green” ideology contained a significant anti-Western component that was counter to the artificial consumer lifestyle that was typical of European societies and which, of course, also exploited nature. So Fortuyn’s assassin was on the side of nature against the excesses of capitalist culture. But he also stated that he wanted to eliminate Fortuyn in order to protect the immigrant population from Fortuyn’s political strategy. Background in Brief The Netherlands was and still is a very wealthy country in which the welfare state of a social democratic variety had been dominant and which had sported a highly liberal attitude to all traditional values, critical of its own puritanism and both generous and open to other cultures and peoples. The glorious period of the 1960s and 1970s was similar in much of Europe, with increasing levels of consumption and higher living standards, in which state transfers successfully

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dampened class differences but also in which class politics was important in the definition of a future utopia of equality and freedom. This situation changed radically with the economic contraction that began at the end of the 1970s in most of Europe and ended in the emergence of “flexibilization” of both capital accumulation and of labour, the massive export of production and jobs, and the effective downward mobility of large sections of the working class, as well as the simultaneous yuppification of the new financial capitalist sectors. In the 1980s and 1990s class relations became increasingly polarized in objective terms at the same time as they were increasingly ignored as a basis for political action. In the earlier period, ethnicity – cultural difference in general – was relatively unmarked in Western Europe, at least in public discourse. In the following period cultural difference replaced class as the dominant discourse. There is a connection with broader global processes in this transformation. The 1980s saw declining hegemony and increasing disorder in large parts of the formerly Western- and Soviet-dominated world, leading to political and cultural fragmentation, to warfare, and to large-scale migration to Europe. Two important changes characterized this new situation, changes to which we return later in the discussion. First, among elites there was a fusion of left and right into a respectable centrist politics. Second, with the decline of modernism, of the ideal of a better world in the future, the past loomed ever more important. The past was about origins, thus about culture, and this combined with migration that could not, in a stagnating industrial economy, lead to integration. The result was a search for meaningful roots, which led to ethnicization among both nationals and immigrants, and multiculturalism became an increasingly dominant ideology among political and related elites who no longer had class on their agenda. There is a logic in this transformation of part of the left that is important to consider here, one that I have described for Sweden that displays a number of similarities with the Netherlands. The top-down multicultural politics of the new centrist right-left combination links a number of elements. First, new political coalitions transcended – in Tony Blair’s and Anthony Giddens’s (2000) sense – the right-left divide. This is epitomized in the Third Way of New Labour but also of the Neue Mitte in Germany. Social democracy assimilated neo-liberal politics and redefined it as not only progressive, but also necessary.



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The dismantling of the welfare state, on this account, was necessary because of globalization, a force of nature, that implies increasing competition and therefore cuts in spending, but is understood as good and progressive. As Giddens puts it, “‘Radicalism’ cannot any longer be equated with ‘being on the left.’ On the contrary, it often means breaking with established leftist doctrines where they have lost their purchase on the world” (39). Now, of course, “radical” can be right as well as left, and its defin­ ition has never been that clear, but it has usually meant extreme, a movement away from accepted centrist doctrine. Giddens has, however, defined radical with a movement from social democracy to liberalism, that is, a radical centrism. Furthermore it is connected to the notion of la voie unique, namely, that there is only one way to govern, an approach that has been institutionalized in New Public Management, and which makes nonsense of popular democracy. The people, the demos, are, if anything, dangerous for real democracy (Burns et al. 2000) and can be replaced by a model in which the true actors are corporations, ethnic groups, government agencies, and experts. The concept of “the people” is returned to the notion of classes dangereuses from a previous era, an object of fear and of necessary resocialization. Multiculturalism is logically compatible if not necessary in this process of reconfiguration. The latter transforms “the people” into “the peoples,” and in the highly centralized state formations of Western Europe, it entails horizontal segregation as well as the encompassment of difference so that the state becomes a primus inter pares rather than representative of a single population. It also, in this way, disassociates the emergent political class from its constituency. In the Swedish case this has implied a cosmopolitanization of political identity including denial among members of the political class of national origins. A former minister of immigration replied, during an interview, when asked if he was Swedish, “No!” and gleefully recounted his genealogy, which had origins in Scotland, Germany, and Denmark. This raison généologique and an explicitly anti-national mentality has upstaged the older assumptions of national identity among elites. In a government act from 1998–99 the Swedish government redefines the country as a plural society that no longer has “a common history,” but it is not clear to what extent this has occurred in the Netherlands.

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The general tendency is, in any case, quite evident in both France and in Sweden. In France the upward distantiation of the already existent “political class” has been analyzed in a number of popular books with expressive titles such as La faute aux élites (Juillard 1997) and Le gouvernement invisible: Naissance d’une démocratie sans le peuple (Joffrin 2001) where the new political elite’s multicultural politics has been described as I have done for Sweden. Ruling sections of the left have shifted toward the right and class politics has become cultural politics. Second, the demographic composition of the Western nationstate has changed significantly with the massive increase in immigration, but it is not the demographic change that is crucial. Rather it is the way in which the identity of both immigrants and host populations is practised and the way such practices have been transformed. The fundamental change is not, then, quantitative but qualitative, consisting largely in the process of ethnicization or more generally in the intensification of cultural identification. The latter has led to a process of transnationalization of social, cultural, and economic relations within the migration process but also in the increasing fear, not least among downwardly mobile national populations, of the unknown and the foreign – which leads to increasing xenophobia. There is marginalization both among nationals and immigrants in this period, and this is expressed in the reconfiguration of urban space in which enclavization becomes generalized. Conflict necessarily increases in such situations, and to this we must add another geopolitical/geocultural development. The particular case of the growth of militant and at least oppositional Islam is that which has been most salient. The geopolitics of this situation combines the general enclavization process with a growing geopolitical representation of the world that pits the Islamic world against the Christian (and Jewish) West. The movement for the establishment of Islam in Europe and even, for some ideologues, the Islamization of Europe as reinforced oppositional identifications, has become more or less institutionalized after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the ensuing war on terror.2 In this process of polarization the generalized increase in existential insecurity combines with what is perceived as aggression, which is not a mere fantasy, and takes on the prototypical characteristics of occidentalists versus Islamophobes. To reduce this to one-sided racism is absurd. There have been no attacks on Buddhists, Hindus, or



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Orthodox Christians. But these religions do not form part of a world historical cosmology of such schismogenic scale. This in turn reinforces the process of enclavization that accompanies the usual effects of non-integration: exclusion and poverty, aggression and criminality. Many European countries find themselves in a critical situation with respect to just such a state of affairs. This is very different from the situation in the 1960s and early 1970s when immigrants were sought after, usually integrated, and often assimilated into their host countries. Many previous immigrants from this period are themselves very disturbed by the current situation and are often quite suspicious of the immigration policies that have dominated recent decades.

Pim Fortuyn In the Netherlands the new centrist governments are called “purple” as in red (left) + blue (right) and have divided the old left (old is not the real old left but the old new left from the 1960s and 1970s). Fortuyn was part of that left which became disaffected. He represented the dominant culture of the previous period that had combined a strong sense of popular sovereignty with cultural iconoclasm. This implied that homosexuality in its most flamboyant expression could be perfectly acceptable within the social field of Dutch society since it was part and parcel of Dutch liberation politics. It could not, however, accept the existence of other social projects imported from the outside, especially if they implied an arbitrary restriction on rights that had been won by struggles within Dutch society. In February of 2002, “A reporter asked him [Fortuyn] why he felt so strongly about Islam. ‘I have no desire,’ he replied, ‘to have to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again. There are many gay high school teachers who are afraid of revealing their identity because of Turkish and Moroccan boys in their classes. I find that scandalous” (cited in Buruma 2006: 57). This republican or national or sovereigntist left typifies the emergent ideologies that are the basis of support for figures like Fortuyn. His murder was not, then, a mere expression of the progressive rage at a right-wing racist or even Nazi as some called him. Thus, part of the left became what I call respectable, neo-liberal, and multicultural, while another part became sovereigntist and maintained the old socialist ideals as well as an assimilationist ideology.

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What is most interesting in this is that this position developed primarily in reaction to Islam rather than to immigration in general. The former became a symbol for resistance and even aggression to values considered central to Western democratic culture. And it became increasingly manifest following the attack on the World Trade Center. Fortuyn’s murder was not the work of a foreigner, but of an internal oppositional actor, one who identified with Nature and would go to extremes to protect it from a meat-eating, fur-wearing consumerist who was against the proliferation of Islam via immigration. What are the oppositions that characterize the intentionality of the vegan? In this case it might be an example of what Buruma and Margalit (2004) have called occidentalism, an occidentalism that associates Western values with evil and the decadence of the contemporary world and that opposes those values. Is there a logic to the overt statements by assassin Volkert van der Graaf that Fortuyn had to be killed not only because of his negative relation to Nature but because of his negative attitude to immigration? For van der Graaf, immigrants seem to be associated with Nature as well, as if those parts of the world from which immigrants come are the Other, the holistic, good Other and representatives of an alternative to the West. That Otherness is associated with a holistic relation to nature as well, a primitivism as an inversion of the modernist developmentalism of the West. These may be rather loose connections but they are similar to those that I have found in interviews with members of such groups: they reproduce racialist logic while being anti-racist. Fortuyn became an instant hero in the Netherlands. His funeral was a true spectacle, highlighting his own taste for luxury. His Daimler was in the cortege driven by his chauffeur, with Fortuyn’s two dogs. There was music and there were football songs, both of which expressed national and local football tribalism – and all of this for a flamboyant homosexual dandy. Social Democrat Ad Melkert, who attended the funeral, was accosted by a well-dressed elderly woman who screamed, “Now you’ve got what you want, you bastard” (Buruma 2006: 44). Not just a hero for many, but a virtual saint, a holy figure embodying a sovereign ideal of what was perceived as a world soon to be lost. Fortuyn was voted the most popular man in Dutch history, and a statue was erected in his name in



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Rotterdam with the motto “Loquendi libertatem custodiamus” (Let us safeguard the right to speak). This is the kind of reaction that liberals and those leftists who have appropriated liberal pluralism abhor. Buruma is cynical about the reaction and explicitly characterizes Fortuyn as a paradoxical figure: “Fortuyn was no Haider or Le Pen; he was something more interesting: a populist who played on the fear of Muslims while boasting of having sex with Moroccan boys; a reactionary who denounced Islam for being a danger to Dutch liberties; a social climber who saw himself as an outsider battling the elite … he was a peddler of nostalgia” (Buruma 2006: 47). This echos the interpretation of many self-identified liberal progressives, even though Buruma himself is ambivalent about the situation, and while against Fortuyn’s politics, he understands that there is a real political issue here rather than just plain populist trickery.

Van Gogh Theo Van Gogh, grand-nephew of the great artist, was brought up in the cultural elite, though certainly not rich. He was a member of the dissident left and famous for his provocative and even vulgarly provocative style. Not given to understatement, he appeared often on TV and had a newspaper column in which he attacked a great many things. He was accused of anti-Semitism, and renowned for a whole series of crude invectives against personalities in the Dutch culture scene. Much of this is accounted for by Buruma in terms of personality, but there is also a logic to this. Van Gogh became famous in the Netherlands by means of an invective that was very much aimed at what he saw as the hypocrisy that was prevalent in his own society. His language followed suit, littered with four-letter words and their spectacular elaboration. He immediately became interested in Fortuyn and the two became friends, the latter writing “one-liners” for Van Gogh’s media appearances. As a young man he had made a few extremely foul films but some very interesting works as well. He made a film about the assassination of Fortuyn in which a conspiracy of the US Secret Service, the extreme right, and American intervention play central roles. Van Gogh attacked everything and everyone. He cannot be reduced to a racist, not unless his racism is entirely generalized. He attacked

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all ethnic groups including his own, a true “equal opportunity racist.” He was primarily a champion of what he thought of as honesty, hard talk, and the abhorrence of hypocrisy in whatever form. His attraction to Ayaan Hirsi Ali (see below) stems from the manner in which her own critique of Islam was treated as dangerous and all too provocative by the political elite of the country. This of course led to his film together with her, Submission, which deals with the oppression of women in Islam, but it is also a direct attack on the prophet Mohammed. It is this “blasphemy” that provoked Van Gogh’s murder. But Van Gogh also helped a number of young Muslim actors and employed them in his films. In one televised drama about cross-ethnic love, he is clearly on the side of the Moroccan boy rather than the Dutch policeman who is the father of the girl or the Dutch boyfriend who causes the Moroccan boy to drown. These are cases in which the individuals break the rules represented by their parents, on both sides. As he said, “There are a hundred thousand decent Muslims, to whom we Dutch people ought to reach out” (Buruma 2006: 108). Van Gogh was one of the few Dutch directors to make films about the issues of immigration. He was decidedly politically incorrect on all fronts. This was his modus vivendi, and it was the cause of his death. Of course there were many liberals who accused him of causing his own death, that is, via his provocative style. He was clearly not a person who was afraid of “rocking the boat,” but he was apparently unaware of the price to be paid in the contemporary world of multicultural conflict. Hirsi Ali Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, was brought up as a devout Muslim in East Africa, went to Islamist schools, and was completely engaged in the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, of martyrdom, and of wearing the hijab as a teenager. But at the age of twenty-two, when she was to be married off to a cousin in Canada, she revolted against her fate and escaped to Europe. She admits openly that she lied about her Somali origins and her family, which later caused her serious problems, because she thought it would be easier to gain acceptance in Europe. She is an outspoken critic of Islam, not least with regard to the treatment of women, and she was involved, as stated above, in Van Gogh’s film Submission, for which she wrote the screenplay.



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The film is a frontal attack on the relation between Islam and gender dominance and its inherent violence. It was this film that apparently led to Van Gogh’s eventual death at the hands of Mohammed Bouyeri, a Moroccan Muslim who attacked and killed him as he was cycling to work. Bouyeri stabbed Van Gogh numerous times and planted a knife in his chest with a note of warning to Hirsi Ali. Bouyeri was the son of an immigrant who was a successful hard-working man who became handicapped in his long life of labour. Bouyeri was a bright boy, open-minded, and interested in becoming part of Dutch society, but a number of setbacks ruined his career in this respect. First, his club lost its meeting place due to urban renewal. He was involved in a brawl with police and subsequently turned down for a job at the airport. Finally, he was unsuccessful in his relationship with women, especially Dutch women, all of which incited increasing aggression. It has been noted by many that the makings of violent aggression to Western society are often the result of failure in projects of self-integration. This is probably as true for Westerners as for immigrants, but in the latter case the aggression can take on a cultural form that is clearly marked, as in the case of Islamism, a solution that is also open to Westerners as can be seen among the several terrorists of Western extraction.

The Cultural Logic of Two Assassinations There is a logical similarity in these two murders, one that can be understood in terms of the following scheme of opposed terms: West/non-West Decadence/Vitality Secular/Religious Lax(-authority)/Controlled(+authority) Civilization/Nature Now these terms can be found in both the statements of Bouyeri and of those who supported him in principle even if disagreeing with him in practice, as well as of van der Graaf, although here information from other vegans needs to be used to account for the categories he employed. In both cases there is a prominent occidentalist positioning. The West is seen to represent everything

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negative: decadence, secularism, laxity – all of which is associated with civilization as opposed to the natural holistic worlds of the Other. What is sometimes referred to as primitivism is an inversion of the signs of a former relation of dominance. In the modernist period the West was associated with vitality and control as well as with individual(ist) liberation. The dandy, sexuality, and female and homosexual liberation are part of this, all terms that refer to the individual subject as against the collectivity. Modernist liberation became the rallying point for the support of both Fortuyn and Van Gogh in a state dominated by an elite that had gone liberal-multiculturalist. Why should this pose a problem? After all liberalism and multiculturalism are excellent partners. But, of course, liberation is not liberalism. On the contrary, the radical left is quite opposed to liberalism as such. The split in the left occurred, as we have indicated, because a significant part of the left moved toward the liberal centre. I offer here a speculation on the changes involved in political culture that this situation helps to clarify.

Occidentalism and Ideological Inversion Since the end of the 1970s there has been an inversion of signs on a set of oppositions that can be said defines Western identity in most Western countries. The former dominant ideology or identity was one in which the West was the centre and the non-West the lowerranked periphery, in which the West had surpassed superstition and arrived at a scientifically dominated secular society, in which the truth was about the scientific search for truth in true modernist fashion. This has come to be reversed in a double sense. First, the economic and now the cultural hegemony of the West is in decline and challenged from new rising or contesting regions. The contestation is also part of the ideological inversion of modernism within the West itself. Some of this has been discussed in Friedman (2002, 2010) and in the recent Buruma and Margalit volume, Occidentalism (2004). It refers to the transformation of the representation of the progressive, one that Van Gogh and Fortuyn did their best to dismantle. Buruma (2006: 30) is acutely aware of the kind of ideological inversion for which we have argued:



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Table 8.1 The shifting content of progressive ideology 1968

1998

The national The local Collective Social(ist) Political intervention Homogeneous Monocultural Equality (sameness)

The postnational The global Individual Liberal Moral intervention Heterogeneous Multicultural Hierarchy (difference)

There is a long and frequently poisonous history in European politics of left-wing internationalism and conservative defence of traditional values. The Left was on the side of universalism, scientific socialism, and the like, while the Right believed in culture, in the sense of “our culture,” “our traditions.” During the multicultural age of the 1970s and 1980s, this debate began to shift. It was now the Left that stood for culture and tradition, especially “their” culture and tradition, that is, those of the immigrants, while the Right argued for the universal values of the Enlightenment. The problem in this debate was the fuzzy border between what was in fact universal and what was merely “ours.” The shift described in Table 8.1 is an expression of the ideological inversion of the representation of “the progressive” in the West, which is also encompassed in what one might call the shift from orientalism to occidentalism, a shift from a self-assured imperial centre to a weakened cultural authority, the target of both internal and external onslaughts. All of this is the true expression of a real hegemonic decline. This comparison of two different decades indicates the sudden shift in identification that is reflected in the case study provided by Buruma. It occurs within a single generation, although from interviews there are many younger people who identify with the progressive terms for 1998 listed in Figure 8.1 who are quite unaware of the previous ideology. For those who have undergone the shift themselves repression is a common solution, or even denial, but rarely

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Figure 8.1.  External meets internal occidentalism.

a more serious consideration of what has happened. An analysis of this set of oppositions throws further light on the Dutch situation. The 1960s and early 1970s were an era of “national liberation” applied to the Third World, to decolonization, and to the rights of Indigenous peoples, all fused in a millenarian project of liberation and local or national sovereignty. The post-national did not of course exist in this period. But there was instead internationalism, which meant primarily class alliance and for some, for example, Trotskyists, the formation of a world socialist order. There were debates, going back to the turn of the last century, regarding the socialist project, but the terms were indeed different and they were in any case based on a notion of people as the class, whether national or international. The core of the notion of national liberation concerned the issue of sovereignty, the control by a population of its conditions of existence. The post-national position is instead entirely negative to the national, heaping invective on the latter as the source of xenophobia, essentialism, racism, Nazism, and the like, and characterized in general by the metaphor of closure. The idea of the local follows from the same concept of sovereignty, but applied to the selfidentified community, whether a tribe or a political commune. It is rejected today in favour of the global which is no longer associated with encroachment and the world capitalist economy, but with openness and, therefore, progress. The collective is a mere summation of a set of terms also related to sovereignty, in which a common social project is the basic value. The shared quality of the goal creates the movement for change or revolution and the latter are



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understood as collective ventures. This is replaced by the centrality of the individual and a rejection of the collective as dangerous. This rejection is partly fuelled by the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet empire and the transition to individualist liberalism in the left – which gave the collective a bad name. This transition is characterized by the breakdown of working-class organization and by the increasing focus on individual fulfilment via consumption, whether of commodities, tradition, or religion. This is reflected in the shift from social to liberal and from political to moral representations of the world. It is also a shift from the creation of a new world to the struggle for particular human rights and humanist interventions. In the 1960s the homogeneous was simply a product of the ideology of sovereignty, of a common project. This was not an issue of the cloning of subjects but of shared goals. It is today conflated with essentialism and the homogeneous nation – which should and shall be replaced by diversity and heterogeneity. The monocultural follows from this, of course, but here refers only to political culture, since other forms of cultural specificity were unmarked (in terms of identity) in the 1960s. The politicization of culture in a situation of fragmentation and ethnicization generated the opposed term multiculturalism. Egalitarianism is also replaced in the wake of heterogenization, which is applied in cultural terms in a transition that moves from equality as sameness to equality as difference, and the latter can imply and certainly allows for hierarchy. In any case the erasure of class differentiation from the new emphasis on culture largely eliminated any concern with such matters. This shifting perspective on the world provides some content to the structural transformation that I am trying to grasp. It is one that contains another series that is explicitly discussed by Buruma and Margalit (2004), one in which the West is seen as the prototype of all the terms on the left-hand side of the set of oppositions shown in Table 8.1).

The Resurgence of the Other If orientalism, as we suggest above, can be understood as the ideo­ logical framework of Western domination, the decline of Western hegemony can be translated into a resurgence of Otherness. This is reflected in the emergence of Indigenous movements and the general ethnicization referred to above. The threat to the disaffected

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republican left is not the threat of other cultures themselves, but the threat of one’s own culture being contested by real Others as well as by the new liberal elites that have emerged from the former ranks of the progressive, the new cosmopolitans who are among the chief perpetrators of occidentalist perspectives. In the West itself this is the core of post-colonial discourse, of the critique of orientalism. Now Van Gogh was a vicious critic of his own society, but his criticism was not foundational and it was not cultural. On the contrary his critique, like that of the left of the 1960s, was directed toward the hypocrisy of politicians, to smug bourgeois notions of political correctness, and of a particular status quo. This was critique from the inside, based on the values and ideals of the same culture that was used to target the failure of those values in actual practice. The new occidentalist critique, however, was total, summed up in the famous Stanford University chant, “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Western culture’s got to go!” Occidentalism refers to the latter phenomenon, of course, but it is also one that is represented in the Islamicist onslaught and that is crucial in understanding why it is just here that the conflict has been strongest. It is strangely essentialist when we consider that it comes from a post-colonial discourse that sees essentialism as the major problem of Western orientalism, but that nevertheless engages itself in the essentialization of the West. The two murders discussed here are, in this sense, examples of internal and external occidentalism, the first, the vegan-ecological rage against modern capitalist society, and the second, the rage against secular modernism and the West as its chief imperial representative.This accounts for the overlap in the positions of Bouyeri and Van der Graaf. The overlap lies in the occidentalist identification with the Other. That “Other” could be the primitive/traditional counterpart to civilization as it appeared within orientalist discourse but with the signs reversed. The two sets are, of course, inconsistent, but for the occidentalist there are always ways to explain apparent inconsistencies in positive terms. Thus, strength, authority, and religion as categories are reconfigured as part of a holistic vision that contains that which is sorely lacking in the West. Decadence enters as the expression of consumerist desire without self-control and without consideration for the environment. As the West is defined as a negative term, only the West can be dominant and imperialist. And the core of the problem is the nation-state itself, the generator of essentialist



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evil. Thus, a great effort is made to depict the Ottoman Empire (Mills 2008, 2010; Mayaram 2008, Borovali 1998) as progressive in its millet system of multiculturalism by insisting on the intrinsically non-Western character of such a social arrangement. Multiculturalism belongs to the Other in this inversion of signs. The above pattern depicts a broad transformational process, transformational in the structuralist sense because it involves the reversal of signs among relations whose underlying properties are invariant. The equation at the end contains the statements made by the two murderers, one an internal occidentalist and the other an external occidentalist. The coincidence of these oppositional positions is the conjunctural expression of declining global hegemony. This is not, of course, the entire story but it does reveal a set of parameters that are also evident in the following cases. The Van Gogh/Fortuyn story is the story of the disaffected left in the most concrete sense. But it is a specific left, characterized by what can be called sovereigntism, the will to power over one’s collective conditions of existence. This is the sovereignty associated with the French Revolution, that which makes it a nationalist (in the most generic sense) movement, one that makes “all power to the people” the core of the ideology of direct democracy in which governance is the extension of the will of the people, where there is no mediating term such as a representative corps of legislators, or at least where the latter are mere extensions of popular sovereignty, meaning here majority sovereignty. All oppositions harbour ambivalence and the above are no exceptions. One might criticize Fortuyn for being a nationalist at the same time as he sported a cosmopolitan elite lifestyle, but oppositions are always relative, and in this case the national for Fortuyn was about his own perspective on the West – which he associated with the liberal gains that made his own homosexual existence more bearable. His opposition to Islam was about his own liberty and a world that enabled him to gain the latter. Both Fortuyn and Van Gogh represent a radical modernist position that entails continuous critique in a way that is prototypical for Western modernism. In this sense there is no break with the modern but rather its intensification. This can be said to be shared by classical revolutionary movements and their avant-gardes, all part of a specific and waning tradition of history making.

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The configuration is not specific to the Netherlands although it expresses a specific historical conjuncture. The republican left is an established voice in France as well as in the Netherlands, but it hardly exists in England or in Scandinavia as a collective phenomenon. There is a small but growing political party in Sweden, the Swedish Democrats, that might be said to represent the same kind of political position, just as the much larger Danish People’s Party. For the former, many of the members are former socialists and even communists, as in the case of the Front National in France. Individual voices certainly exist in all countries of Europe, but it is especially in the Netherlands and France that they exist as collective expressions. In terms of shifting politics one might describe a more general logic or invariant, which can be manifested in a number of different forms or combinations depending on specific cultural/historical conditions. It should be noted, however, that what is invariant here is an invariant logic of change rather than a static form. The classical left (socialist and social democratic) and right have tended to merge in terms of practical politics. This merger is expressed in a series of terms using the adjective “new”: new democrats, new labour, even new conservatives (who are moderates in Sweden), and especially neue Mitte in Germany where its spatial character captures the reordering of the political arena. The doctrine involved in this is contained in the various documents and publications concerning the Third Way, also expressive of a new centralism. The new centralization of politics is cemented by New Public Management (NPM) ideology in which a single praxeology of governance is meant to replace the “ideological” principles of the past and it is enunciated from both left and right: la voie unique from the socialists in France to den enda vägen from the Swedish right. Politics is reduced to management in this way, just as class issues are stricken from the political agenda as a basis of organization. The above process becomes intimately articulated with the shift from class to culture that began somewhat earlier in the 1980s. The decline of modernism, the decline of Fordism, the emergence of flexible accumulation, flexible labour, and the economic crisis of the state and its consequent outsourcing spelled the end of an era of the centralized state social project dominated by modernist assimilation as well as welfare, which on the left was the socialist or at least social democratic project itself and on the right the liberal



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modernist project in which homogeneity was crucial for the notion that the state was an instrument of “the people.” The decline of the modernist project, very much related to the declining hegemony of the West, led to a series of re-identifications based on the only thing that could be said to be fixed in a chaotic world, cultural identity. The latter, of course, is not fixed in objective terms, but it is experienced as fixed. Cultural identity of this sort, chosen or reborn in a period of crisis can be described as achieved ascription. Thus, roots, ethnicity, religion, and gender all increase in political importance. As this is accompanied by real disorder and increasing displacement of populations, it also imprints itself on the migration wave of the 1980s. It is not, of course, migration that leads to the growing issue of immigrant culture and identity. Rather it is the increasing focus on identity itself in this period of declining modernism. The previous period in Europe was characterized by large-scale labour migration as well, but in that period of economic expansion ethnicity was not a major issue since it was still dominated by modernist ideology. In those “old days,” class solidarity played a more important role than ethnicity (Touraine 1978, 1979; Wieviorka 1996; Wieviorka and Ohana 2001). The involvement of the political establishment in all of this is crucial for understanding the way in which the contemporary situation came to be structured. The decline of modernism had a major effect on the political elites. The loss of political ideology on the left and the economic transformation in the West that undermined class politics linked these elites to the general process of increasing cultural and identity politics which became their own agenda in this period. As immigration became a cultural issue that wouldn’t go away, multiculturalism became a possible program. And as governance became increasingly distanced from popular opinion, the politics of culture became a new source of state activity. Top-down multiculturalism became a new agenda for both liberals and the left – which was already becoming liberal – as submitted by Juillard (1997: 105): Aux ouvriers elles ont substitué les immigrés et ont reporté sur ceux-ci le double sentiment de crainte et de compassion qu’inspire généralement le prolétaire. Or l’immigré n’est pas seulement victime de l’exclusion sociale, mais aussi de l’exclusion ethnique, autrement dit du racisme.

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(They have substituted immigrants for the working class and have invested the former with the double emotion of fear and compassion that formerly inspired the relation to the proletariat. However, the immigrant is not only a victim of social exclusion but also of ethnic exclusion, in other words, racism.) The substitution of immigrant for worker spelled a shift from the “sociological” left to the “moral” left. This is not a mere question of changing strategies but an important structural transformation, or even an articulation of transformations. Suddenly politics was about racism rather than class inequality. And the discourse on multiculturalism that dominated the transition was the celebration of difference as a factor of social enrichment. The identification of political elites as cosmopolitan is also part of this process since it provided the perspective needed to look down on the world, so to speak, and marvel in the jumble of exotica to be found in the global concentration of differences. In some cases, as that of Sweden, the ideology became an issue of the necessity of importing difference, which turned out to be ideologically and economically advantageous as well as a source of cultural enrichment, as described by Westin (2000: 734): “Diversity is linked with immigration. If immigration is stopped, diversity is jeopardized. Policy-makers should reassess immigration policy. Diversity should not be seen as a means to handle what is perceived as ‘problematic immigration.’ Rather, immigration needs to be seen as the positive means to achieve the goal of diversity. All Western countries have ageing populations. If welfare systems are to be maintained immigration of labor power will soon become an economic demographic necessity.”3 The parallels between such statements and the crasser statement to be found in the colonial pluralism of the past are quite striking. Moreover, as in the colonial era, diversity was a critical ingredient in governance in which the relation between rulers and ruled was not bound to political representation. That is, in colonial regimes there are no citizens, only subjects. As rulers are lifted into a higher sphere of governance they escape the demands of accountability of those governed. The diversification of the population accelerates the transformation of “the people” into peoples, the state becoming increasingly absolute in its functioning. In this process the national population can be reduced to just another ethnic group.



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The contemporary issues of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism are all generated as political concerns from this complex of changes. To characterize this development, we might say that it consists in a movement from the nation-state to a plural society. If this were combined with the movement toward a new, less democratic, centralized state, then the future Western polity might return to some form of absolutism, or even to an internal colonialism, which is one possible outcome of absolute rule. Absolutist states were, we note, supremely pluralist, not least insofar as they had no “people” to deal with, only “peoples” – who were subjects rather than citizens (Friedman 2010). The classical left has split along the issues of the common project and its relation to shared values into a liberal (and even neoliberal) dominant wing and a traditional sovereigntist/republican wing. The latter is classified as backward-looking and even reactionary by the former. This is a general split in all of its variations. In Europe it is a split between dominant social democratic elites and what is often the marginalized left within the party or even outside of the party. Republican tendencies in France have connected former left and right elements under the banner of the republic and the nation. In France these are powerful tendencies that cannot be easily dismissed. In Sweden such tendencies are seen by the dominant liberal elites as reactionary, racist, and anti-democratic. Traces of the same split can be found in the intellectual left in the United States, where former leftists such as Todd Gitlin (1995) and Eric Jacoby (1994) were often recategorized as reactionary on the grounds that they represent a republican/national ideal.4 In politics the shift to the centre is expressed in the entry of large numbers of former leftists into the ranks of the Democratic Party and the growth of multicultural politics not least in the university world, which became the locus of a new discourse of post-colonial hybridity, while on the street ethnic politics reigned supreme. The labile variable here is the degree to which the ruling new liberal elites have been able to contain the republican renegades by redefining the political arena. This ability depends on the specific political culture of the country. In Sweden, for example, the shift to multicultural from class politics has occurred without a republican split because tendencies in that direction have been successfully contained by labelling them as racist, fascist, and even Nazi in

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conditions of ideological hegemony. Thus, the republican left has been labelled as right and race has become the definitive factor in differentiating left and right. Such hegemony has not been possible in most other countries. The Netherlands is an example of the more usual situation of contestation in which the state is liberal and multicultural. France is another example of this situation of contestation in which the state is republican. The United Kingdom has some similarities to Sweden, but the state has recently backed down on multiculturalism after several decades of pluralist politics. On the other hand, the structure of the political space of the United Kingdom is quite special with an imperial level in which there are subjects of the crown and a national level that is characterized by national citizenship. It might be suggested that it is the imperial imaginary that makes the recourse to cultural pluralism an attractive possibility in the United Kingdom. In this process the elites have seen themselves becoming increasingly estranged from their national constituencies, as welfare has been outsourced and downsized at the same time as their own privileges have significantly increased. They tend to look upward and outward and identify increasingly beyond the nation-state and into the cosmo-sphere, the arena of a global elite community. This latter encompasses liberalism and sometimes neo-liberalism, occidentalism, multiculturalism, and some form of hybridity, understood as the fusion of difference, as in fusion cooking which also appears in this period. In a number of countries this process is accompanied by a shift of lower-class voters from the left to what are called right-wing nationalist parties. This is the phenomenon of “lemon nationalism,” among the downwardly mobile members of the working class. The support for such parties on the part of this segment of the national population is well documented and it is related to the decline of the industrial sector in the West and the resultant downward mobility of the increasingly under- or unemployed members of this sector.

Structure and the Logic of Transformation If we consider these processes, we can suggest a trajectory that might account for the transitions involved. The splitting of the left occurs in most European countries, but it is most strongly manifested in



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the Netherlands and France, whereas in other countries it has been suppressed by the new liberal-left actors themselves. These differences are, as we have said, variations on common themes rather than totally separate and unrelated cases. They are united by a combination of invariant tendencies in the vertical space of the nation-state and historical particularities in the states themselves. The general process is one in which the left splits into two, the liberal sector moving toward the liberal right in a consolidation of a new centrism while the other part of the left (old left?) moves increasingly toward a localist/sovereigntist position that merges in some respects with the new right nationalism. The left-right centralist fusion generates a process of political marginalization of those sectors of both right and left that refuse the move toward the centre. Furthermore, the centre is also cosmopolitan and even post-national, and it very often harbours a strong anti-nationalist self-identity. These new quasi-coalitions create a new division, but this is unlike the former left/right division because it is decidedly hierarchical. As class politics declines, moral politics rises to dominance. Political discourses are about the good, about good governance, transparency, human rights, openness, tolerance, and even about an embrace (at a distance to be sure) of the Other who is now among us as a product of mass immigration. It is also about culture and respect for culture, not all culture but the culture of others defined as the victims of colonialism. This representation is shared by immigrant actors as well as their cosmopolitan allies. The degree to which it is formulated by the former depends on the articulateness of the population in question, a variable that is linked to education and social class. The French movement, Les indigènes de la république (http://www.indigenes-republique.fr/) is an example of the inversion of signs discussed here. The participants in the movement represent themselves as colonial subjects within the heart of the French state, and they demand the inversion of values that would enable them to achieve their freedom from dominance. In Sweden a similar interpretation has developed, but here it is in a group of researchers hired by the state to investigate discrimination (Kamali 2006). They argue that Sweden is structurally racist because of the dominance of Swedish culture, a particular mode of interpreting the world, of acting and teaching, which excludes the foreigner, one that is implicit in all spheres of life, from school to government. The solution to this problem is the elimination of the hegemony

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of Swedish culture in Sweden. The difference between the French and Swedish situations is that while in France “les indigènes” are an outsider group, in Sweden they are representatives of the state. The authors of the report (above)were seen to be so lacking intellectually that they actually caused quite a bit of critical discussion without changing the framework of interpretation from which the report arose. These differences are differences in particular configurations and not in kind. Beneath it all is a basic set of relations that remain constant. The mechanisms of the transformation can be likened to the kind of process discussed by Lévi-Strauss in his “Do Dual Organizations Exist” (1958) in which he delineates the relations between what he calls diametric and concentric dualism and for which he constructed some elaborate models. I suggest here that this is applicable to the reconfiguration of political culture in contemporary Western European nation-states. The political core of concentric dualism is the diarchy discussed by Marshall Sahlins in numerous works since his essay on the “stranger-king” (1985a: 73–93). The language of the cosmopolitanism to which we have referred is clearly akin to Sahlins’s model of foreign rule internalized. It is not exactly the xenophobia of Sparta versus the cosmopolitanism of Athens, although there are interesting zones of overlap. Consider the cosmopolitan Athens with its population of 80 per cent slaves and 20 per cent free and democratic citizens, and the various categories of foreigners, who were categorized as external to Athenian society. Slavery was, of course, directly linked to the Athenian international trade system. Sparta, more self-isolated, had a system of socialist helotry instead based on a striving after self-sufficiency. Is this not similar to the internal divisions of European societies today? In structural terms we might argue for a three-part division: upper classes and certain elites that identify upwards and outwards, working classes in decline that identify inwards, and immigrant lower classes who also identify outward but in a diasporic rather than cosmopolitan way. The latter populations have always existed but have historically been “unmarked,” integrated in a more forceful way into the social order as dependent labour. Of course, in the absence of a nationstate there is no clear “internal” or local population. But even here, as Jean-François Dubost and Peter Sahlins (1999) have shown, there are strong ethnic-territorial identities. So the



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logical order of states might be argued to include the foreign as a hierarchical position of worldly dominance over the local as a structure of the longue durée, a structure that has informed the contemporary cosmopolitan transformation of contemporary political elites. If diametric dualism is based on absolute reciprocity between two moieties that are equal to one another even if there is a certain division of symbolic function among them, concentric dualism is implicitly hierarchical, one side being the inside and the other the outside. The relation between the two is analyzed as a structural transformation that can go in either direction. Lévi-Strauss’s argument is that diametric dualism is not autonomous but a particular expression of concentric dualism – which is the foundational structure. The fact that complementarity implies the possibility of differentiation is the basis of much of his argument, and he provides empirical examples where apparent diametrical dualism contains third terms that imply the possibility of a concentric relation. This is also the ambivalence of the stranger-king or chief who is “domesticated” by the indigenous chief-priest in a ritual in which the former is “sacrificed” and brought back to life, a clearly widespread phenomenon that is well documented for Central Africa by Ekholm-Friedman (1977, 1984). The left/right opposition that has characterized Western European nation-states since the nineteenth century was based on classrelated politics, red versus blue. There are third terms in this pattern that have taken the form of social liberalism, and democratic welfare statism, but the left/right opposition is labile and can be reinvoked at any point in time to rearrange the terms. Thus, social democracy, once a compromise between socialism and the capitalist system, moved from centre to left in more recent decades and is today conflated with official socialism. Welfare state politics can be characterized as liberal, as in the United States, or socialist as in Europe, but then in the recent rise of neo-conservatism, the liberal has often been shifted into the category of socialist (as on Fox News and in the political rhetoric of the US Republican Party). In all of this there is another dimension, that of class, of elite status, and of the respectability of elite status. This hierarchy is repressed in the left/right division since it exists equally on both sides of the divide, and the divide is about the kind of social order to be constructed in the future. Several leaders of Communist parties in Western Europe have been millionaires but this has not been remarked upon in political representations (see Figures 8.2 and 8.3).

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Figure 8.2.  Components of the concentric shift in political culture.

Figure 8.3.  Diametric to concentric dualism.

The transition from the diametrical to the concentric is a complex process in which a number of factors are involved. First, there is the general decline of modernist class politics and the decline of major social projects. This has left the socialist camp without a vision or a project. With the fading of the latter, other identities have gained in prominence and the latter are necessarily of a cultural (in emic terms) character: ethnicity, roots, gender, and territory being among the most salient. This process included an upward mobility on the part of the left best characterized as adherents of the Third Way. The latter became the new centrally positioned elite along with the liberals from several right parties that have made the same (if shorter) transition. Those “left behind,” characterized by the new elites as reactionary, nationalist, and/or racist are from both the left and



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the right and adherents of a position that can best be characterized as sovereigntist. The above graphics highlight certain aspects of the transformation of the right/left division which was formerly more homogeneous at least in terms of representation. In the 1980s and 1990s there was a shift of the left toward the centre just as the liberal right also came to occupy an increasingly centrist position. This shift is a powerful one that is still ongoing today. In France the liberal François Bayrou formed a new party called “le mouvement démocrate” (http://www.mouvementdemocrate.fr/bayrou.html) that aims at a middle of the road liberal position and that has attracted members of both the socialist and liberal blocks. In Italy the Christian Democrats and parts of the left have also fused in a new Democratic coalition. Prodi’s Partito Democratico is a combination of left Christian Democrats and former Communists who today constitute the Democratici di sinistra (http://www.dsonline.it/). Some of the combinations are strange indeed, but they represent an interesting and important tendency toward a centralism. Moreover, the central position is identified as fundamentally practical, la voie unique that can come from either left or right. The new centre represents itself as respectable and responsible and, by definition, the embodiment of democracy. This becomes the new inner circle, whereas the outer circle represents the irresponsible and therefore undemocratic leftovers of a previous era of left/right opposition based on class and universalist social projects. Thus, the new centre is identified with progress, whereas the outer circle represents reaction. In numerous accounts of current conflicts this frame of categorization operates more or less as taken for granted, as doxa. The analysis provided here contrasts with that usually provided by contemporary progressives. Pieterse (2007), in a recent work on global multiculturalism, discusses the conflicts in Denmark, the Netherlands (his home country), and France. In each case he refers to the economic situation; the economic decline of the welfare state, downward mobility, and mass immigration. Here we agree totally, but where he differs is in viewing the rise of the extreme right as a product of populist manipulation by the new extremist political faction. Furthermore, in his analysis “right” means racist and “left” means multicultural, which is, in both historical and contemporary terms, not merely incorrect but totally misleading. My own point

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of departure is the declining hegemony that leads to the economic conditions highlighted, but unaccounted for, by Pieterse. If we merely penetrate beneath the surface of the language we find, as I have argued, that the left is just as much implicated in this change as is the right. The populism, once a word used to describe a certain anti-capitalist and anti-statist left (farmers and workers together), has changed its meaning, and that in itself is significant enough to warrant a deeper analysis than is forthcoming here. It is, in fact, the colonial regimes of Europe and then the liberal right who were the champions of multiculturalism, while the left for most of the past century was strategically monocultural. The left only became multicultural when it shifted to a more liberal and centrist position, and, as I argue, this accounts only for a portion of the left, not least certain elites, the upwardly mobile sector of the left. As we have suggested, the multicultural is a product of the distancing from local or national populations experienced by the new elites; it should not be surprising that multiculturalism is racialized in this perspective. Thus, Pieterse’s account of multiculturalism is entirely demographic and technological, in that it assumes that the movement of people is identical to the movement of culture, so that the co-mingling of people of different origins is also a co-mingling of cultures, enabled and reinforced by the Internet and easy travel to maintain relations to places of origins. It is interesting that such an essentialized view of culture can be maintained in this globalizing and selfidentified anti-essentialist approach. People do not bear cultures within themselves and, then, as in the old days of industrial migration, are forced to give them up. The maintenance or not of cultural repertoires depends on the social practices involved and the changing contexts in which they are located. That is why a large number of people, even today, assimilate or are at least integrated into their host cultures, depending often on class and other economic factors, but still as an intentional process. Demography cannot in itself be an accurate indicator of identity. The position adopted by Pieterse is, however, that, in varying degrees, of the dominant political and cultural elites. That such elites are progressive, in Giddens’s sense, is a translation of the fact that they have adapted to what they themselves call globalization, a globalization that requires downsizing, outsourcing, and networking, not progress in this approach but a symptom of decline itself.



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The entire issue of migration is inverted into a natural effect of globalization itself in the sense (Appadurai 1996, 2006: Hardt and Negri 2000) that we are all on the move nowadays, perhaps because it has been technologically facilitated, and all of this is part of a universal progress from sedentarism to nomadism. This is an integral aspect of an evolutionist vision, one that suppresses the enormous contradictions in the world system that have led to declining possibilities of survival in large parts of the Third World. Pieterse’s argument reduces to a combination of Jihad-and-McWorld and negative economic trends, and the Jihad in this case is represented by the nationalist right: no matter what the reason, economic or other, there are bad guys and good guys, and the bad guys are the localists, sovereignists, nationalists, etc., while the good guys are the multiculturalists and by extension those who are on the move, no matter why and what their motivation. Another set of oppositions characterize this shift which is very much part of those we have discussed above: Politics Morality

Class Race/Culture

Anti-state Pro-state

Organic intellectuals State intellectuals

These oppositions are characteristic of the situation in Europe as is much of the argument of this essay. It would be hopeless at this point to try and include the situation in countries such as the United States, but there are interesting parallels even if they represent different variations on the themes. We might suggest that if we look at the Republican and Democratic parties over the past decades there is also an interesting double set of oppositions beneath the official left/right opposition. Just as in Europe, we might find a transversal categorization that includes liberal republicans, who represent the Eastern establishment and their counterparts in the Democratic Party, from the eras of Roosevelt, Harriman, and later the Kennedys. The latter can be identified with the transatlantic alliance of financial capital that was the core of global organizations, from the Bilderberg to the World Economic Forum and the Trilateral Commission. This is clearly expressed in the close relation between both the Democratic (and Republican) Party and the dominant investment banks that were so involved in the crash of 2008 and in the way members of such banks were involved in the government bailout of the financial sector.

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Here there are the powerful capitalist elites whose interest is in maintaining a system by making compromises, even social democratic compromises where necessary. Opposed to this are a variety of oppositions. First, strange as it might seem, is the recent Republican Christian right (Buchanan 1999), but also large parts of the Democratic South and similar tendencies throughout the country that represent an older populist and working-class political culture, including, as we have suggested, both what are called left and right tendencies. What is specific to the United States is the partial victory of the latter, but similar tendencies can be found in Italy and France and to a lesser degree Germany. If we accept that there are similarities in the political tendencies, even if combined in different configurations, then the recent Republican victories can be understood as a specific conjuncture within the Western sector of the larger global order. It is not our purpose to provide an analysis of these tendencies, but I would suggest that they are part of the same fundamental scheme. It is noteworthy that the Occupy Wall Street Movement and its parallels in Europe has a mixture of Leninist, anarchist, and “extreme” right memberships, including the Tea Party in the United States. And they are opposed to the fusion of centre-left and right in what commentators have referred to as “purple” governance just as in the Netherlands, discussed earlier. This is also evident in the contemporary electoral process. There is a strong political continuity between the Clinton and the Bush administrations. The major difference is the historical shift from financial bubble to real decline. If the Democratic Party sees itself as a party of peace and of redistribution in the current elections, it should not be forgotten that they have very recently stood for the dismantling of whatever welfare institutions did exist, and for their more than fair share of imperial warfare around the world. Intellectuals in all of this are located very much inside of the institutional political order. The former left, which was extra-parliamentarian, is today incorporated into standard party politics. In Europe the decline of radical politics has led to the regrouping of intellectuals into the parties, not least of left intellectuals into standard social democratic institutions. Moreover, as intellectuals produce much of the discourse surrounding these changes, it should not seem unusual that their representations and texts occupy an important place in the contemporary political imaginary.



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Conclusion This discussion has been an experiment in the application of structuralist analysis to contemporary political culture, understood as a set of ordered representations. Lévi-Strauss himself suggested that the analysis of myths could be applicable to the study of political culture in the contemporary world, arguing: “The ‘thought-of’ orders are those of myth and religion. The question may be raised whether, in our own society, political ideology does not belong to the same category” (1958: 300). A major thrust of the work of Marshall Sahlins has been the exploration of the cultural properties of the political which Lévi-Strauss never himself achieved. We have tried to follow this suggestion and feel that it does reveal a great deal concerning the nature of the political process in the modern Western state and in the nature of the constitution of the state order. It also reveals that no understanding of the transformation of the state can be made without placing it within the larger field of ideology understood as the imagined nature of the world in the broadest sense. It questions the absolute dichotomy between left and right and attempts to account for the disappearance of both into the respectable centralist position of practical rule. This movement of diametric to concentric dualism is the central theme of this essay, and it might be suggested that cosmological shifts of this type are not uncommon in history. Our analysis is also meant to be able to account for the violent events in the Netherlands accompanying the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh that have led to yet further confrontations. The formation of a political pale of critics of the status quo who are declassified (déclassé) (Bourdieu 1978) or even demoted as a dangerous class is part of this kind of development. They themselves constitute the outer circle of non- respectful and not respectable troublemakers who were once included within the political spectrum as traditional socialists. These transformations, which have occurred with great rapidity, are evidence for the combinatorial nature of political ideological change in which there are invariant representational structures as well as numerous variants, the latter the product of particular historical conjunctures that are themselves generated by global systemic processes. The political world is a world saturated by strategic choices, but the choices would, if the current

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approach works, be strongly channelled into larger transformative processes that leave less room for alternatives than might appear. The cunning of History is precisely the outcome of a world in which we may know exactly what we are doing, but know little of what we are doing actually does. The only way to arrive at a clearer understanding is to engage in the kind of theoretical activity that Marshall Sahlins has made his hallmark, amplifying in uncharted ways the insights that are structuralist in nature but perhaps more general than that. Marx, for one, understood that “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things coincided” (1971: 817).

Notes 1 Interviews with individuals representing diverse positions, from Anti-Fascist Action to Swedish Democrats were undertaken in the 1990s and early 2000s, a project financed by the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation. 2 See the debates surrounding Tariq Ramadan and Euro-Islam and the critical work of Bassem Tibi on Islamic colonization (2001, 2002, 2008). These are issues that do not exist because of inherent characteristics of one or another culture but because of a particular historical conjuncture. 3 This is common fare in EU political discourses as well, but they do not square with the levels of unemployment in the host countries in question, with the massive elimination of jobs due to technological change and the export of capital other parts of the world. 4 Republican here in the European meaning. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party in the United States.

9 Way-Finding: Respectfulness as a Performance Art Greg Dening

“Way-finding” is the term that modern islanders use to describe their craft and the craft of their ancestors in piloting their voyaging canoes around the Great Ocean, the Pacific, and the Sea of Islands. They prefer to call themselves way-finders rather than navigators. Navigation is a more universal science of instruments and the application of systems of time and space as broad as the cosmos itself. Way-finding is a more interpretive craft closer to the signs the systems of the cosmos imprint on the environment. No navigators would distance themselves from the myriad of signs in sea and sky, wind and water, that tell them where they are. Navigators, however, have the security that the system they are applying in their voyaging has a life outside them – in a book, an instrument, a map. For wayfinders no knowledge, no image is stilled either in time or in space. The temperature of the water, the movement of the waves, the seasons of the stars, the patterns of the winds, and the habits of the birds are all in their heads. And it is a knowledge that comes to them not through their own experience alone. It comes to them down through the ages of their line of masters and apprentices. Way-finders finds their way with style, as surfboarders ride their waves with style. No voyage is ever the same. Their way is always different, but always ruled by their confidence that they will find it (Kyselka 1987, Hau‘ofa 1993, Jolly 2007). I prefer, I must confess, to be a way-finder rather than a navigator in all my voyaging through learning and knowledge. Metaphors are the trade winds of the mind. Models are the doldrums.

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I first met Marshall Sahlins in print sixty years ago, in 1956. I read his “Esoteric Efflorescence in Easter Island” (1955). I remember being startled by it and perhaps feeling a little youthful jealousy of it. What startled me (I still have my notes on it) is that I read the article in the old reading room of the Victorian Public Library in Melbourne, with its dome almost as large as that of the British Library. Just seeing my notes makes me nostalgic for the magical hours I spent there. What startled me about the piece was Sahlins’s ability to read all that I was reading with different eyes. I identified those eyes at the time as “anthropological.” I thought of it as an ability to see quite particular and unique events as larger than themselves and to see them in the context of a rich “discourse” or “paradigm,” although to describe it with those words is now anachronistic. Sahlins was, at the time, like me, meeting his “Natives” in the library. He would have completed, if I have my dating correct, his doctorate at Columbia University at an extraordinarily young age – twenty-four years – in 1954. The book, Social Stratification in Polynesia (1958), that came out of his dissertation would have been in draft before he went to Fiji that year with his young wife, Barbara Vollen. Moala (Sahlins 1962a) was the ethnography that came out of that field trip. Library reading and observation has been the other long-lasting marriage in Sahlins’s life. That marriage has made him both a passionate traditionalist and a revolutionary thinker, perhaps a perfect example of that “specific evolution” of which he was a creative advocate in Evolution and Culture (1960a). Back in 1956, trying to see my “Natives” through the eyes of innumerable strangers, I was passionately historical and a little anti-anthropological. That was because British anthropology (the context of our colonial intellectual experience in Australia) was largely anti-historical, and American anthropology, as we experienced it in the Pacific, was unhistorical. Edward Tylor and Bronisław Malinowski, the architects of the British tradition, were anti-historical largely because they were fighting for a distinctive role for anthropology as a discipline against the dominant historical paradigm. The Americans were unhistorical in the Pacific because they were in “retrieval mode.” They could not bear to observe both the “disappearing” Pacific cultures and the coca-cola bottles littering the islanders’ beaches. We did not know what to call what we did in those days. It was certainly not “real history,” we were told in no uncertain terms. “Real history” was British history, the Renaissance, medieval history. “Natives”



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were unfashionable and infra dig. They still are in some circles. (I notice Lord Beloff recently sounding off about the need for writing the “real history” of empires – and by those at the centre of empire not at the margins.) I was one of the prize students at Melbourne University. My professor, when I told him I was going to Harvard to do anthropology the better to write the peculiar sort of history that I was interested in, said to me, “Dening, this is the end of your academic career.” We called what we did various names: “ethnohistory” for a time, then “culture contact,” “zero-point history.” However, each of those names was unsatisfactory. Ethnohistory seemed to suggest that we did history of the “civilized” and anthropology of the “Natives,” but we wanted to do history and anthropology, anthrohistory if you like, of the island peoples and the intruding strangers. “Cultures” don’t come in “contact.” “Culture contact” was a modelmaker’s concept, developed, if not born, in that most unhistorical resource, the Human Relations Area File. “Zero points” were supposedly those moments of the immediate Time-Before the encounters: there is denigration in that of all that came after. Supposedly, the zero point was the moment of true culture. But it is of the essence of cultures to be modern, to respond to a changing historical environment. Zero point denied creative Aboriginality. In Australia, at least, this has led to the denial of the essential modernity of Aboriginal culture and its depiction as a grotesque mimicry of the “civilized” (Dening 1966, 2001b). Whatever we called this two-sided history, inevitably there were large epistemological issues. The one was that both sides were changed forever by the encounter. Both sides were bound together by the encounter. Those of neither side ever after could see themselves or claim identity without the other. Those on both sides in discovering other possibilities inevitably enlarged their perceptions of themselves metaphorically. Those on both sides inevitably used the other to mirror themselves. The historian writing this changed and changing cultural environment bedevils two hundred years later. An historian does not observe the past. An historian only observes the texts by which the past has been ordered and given meaning. So discussing what “Natives” thought is only done through texts that changed that thinking by transforming it into a Euro-American form of writing and printing. Moreover, when the texts are not of “Natives” thinking but of Euro-Americans reporting what they thought “Natives” were thinking, the distance between the observer and the observed becomes even greater.

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The other epistemological issue was to become political very soon. When there is an event in encounters between peoples of different cultural perceptions, when the one event is actually perceived in totally different ways, from what perspective does one write a history of it? The event has two histories – well, many histories, but let’s focus on the distinct cultural histories. The overall history that is the historian’s is inevitably addressed to an understanding of something that never happened, a blending of the whole into some meaning that the parts never had, never could have. My solution (without argument here as to its propriety) was to play the historian and the anthropologist to both sides of the encounter and then, as well, to myself, the observer-historian. The epistemological issues were politicized in 1961 when Frantz Fanon published his Wretched of the Earth (see Fanon 1965). I don’t remember reading it before 1964. In a world of victims, Fanon wrote, there are no innocents. No one can write two-sided history who in some way benefits by the power of victors. No one can mediate between the disempowered living and the voiceless dead. Fanon shook me, I must confess, and made me wonder what was my place in the history I was writing and teaching. If I have resolved for myself through the years what that place is, it is because I feel that in a history so terrible as that of the Pacific, giving the dead a voice is reason enough for my history. I feel, too, with Marx that the function of my history is not so much to understand the world as to change it. If my history, by story and reflection, disturbs the moral lethargy of the living, then it fulfils a need. I have not silenced any voice by adding mine. Sahlins, in the meantime, was producing books of genius and creating paradigm shifts in anthropology. “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia” (Sahlins 1963b) set the parameters for discussion on cultural systems in the Pacific for twenty years. Culture and Practical Reason (Sahlins 1976b) was a major statement on the relationships between symbolic schemes of culture and the material constraints of physical living, an anthropological adjustment to accepted Marxism. In Stone Age Economics (1972) Sahlins fought against the reduction of economics to a need-satisfying rationalism, “an intellectual mode of Business.” The material life processes of society, in his view, were suffused with the same complexities as religion and politics and to the same end. He was, too, a passionate defender of cultural creativity in the great sociobiology debates of the 1970s and 1980s.



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Consistent through all this was Sahlins’s thesis that it was the cultural symbolic system that was the mode of ordinary human relationships. It clothed everything in discernible meanings. Meanings were discernible precisely because in the uniqueness of every experience there was also structure. Actions, gestures, expressions, rituals – every symbolic act – contained the specificity and generality combined in the famous Saussurean relationship of langue and parole. Cultures were as different as languages, as idiosyncratic within themselves as speech, but communicable because of their shared forms. Their differences were what made anthropology possible. The system in them, available to participants, was also available to the observer. Sahlins has always been skeptical, I think, of an anthropological history of one’s own culture. Difference, for Sahlins, has always been a cultural birthright and an anthropological Rosetta stone. I do not know what set Sahlins’s sights on Hawai‘i. I suspect that he was restless over unfinished business in Fiji. He rediscovered the quirky, maverick spirit of A.M. Hocart in Hocart’s own manuscript fieldnotes and Hocart’s study, Kingship (1927). Possibly Sahlins also discovered the value of enlarging Hocart’s insights into kingship through the whole of the Pacific, and he needed history to do that. Sahlins visited Australia in 1980: he went to Adelaide as president of the anthropology section of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS), and he became a founding member of the Pacific History Association formed in the Clare Valley that same year. I remember well the excitement of a younger generation of Pacific historians at Sahlins’s masterful performances. They were as startled by him in 1980 as I had been in 1956, and for much the same reasons. Suddenly, he was reading the texts they had read in new ways. He was seeing chieftaincy in the Pacific with the reflections born of decades of scholarship culminating in the discourses of Georges Dumézil and James George Frazer on the “stranger-king.” All of us had staged our own perceptions of the “kings” of the Pacific in the way the British, in particular, had created them to serve their imperial purposes. Sahlins, all of a sudden, displayed the ways in which Polynesian cultures could be entered by understanding the ways in which they balanced violent power and legitimating authority. Suddenly, too, a whole range of mythological and traditional texts became readable, not just for the old “Polynesian Problem” of where the islanders had come from, but for the way these texts created a narrative of

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the political and cultural adjustments made when violent strangers from the sea – the chiefs who came from “distant places” before the arrival of the Euro-Americans – came and lived permanently with the Natives of the land. Whatever took Sahlins to Hawai‘i, he found there the perfect theatre for his understanding, developed over thirty years, of how the structures of cultural systems merged with the unrepeatable particularities of cultural events. This was the killing of Captain James Cook by the Hawaiians in Kealakekua on 14 February 1779. The Natives of the land received Cook, a stranger coming from a “distant place,” during a season of the land (makahiki). The “Natives” called Cook, “Lono.” Lono was the “god” of makahiki. Sahlins’s anthro-history of the death of Cook makes sense of that. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981a) was Sahlins’s first definitive effort – if not his first revelation of his thesis – to weave this historical/mythical event into an understanding of anthropological theory. Then, in a series of most prestigious lectures in the most prestigious places the world over, Sahlins adjusted his argument, debated particularities, and filled out his proposition, becoming more certain in his thesis and more expert in his exhaustive knowledge surrounding the events. These lectures appeared as his Islands of History (1985a). During these years Sahlins put on hold a planned history of the Hawaiian islands to complete with Patrick Kirch what surely must be the most exhaustive “historical ethnography” and “archaeology of history” anywhere in the world of Native society under siege from intruding society and adapting to the changes. Anahulu (Kirch and Sahlins 1992, 2 vols), it is called. By any standard, it is a most extraordinary work. James Cook (1728–1779) was a Yorkshire villager and apprentice grocer, North Sea collier seaman, Royal Navy master at the battle of Quebec, Newfoundland hydrographic surveyor, Pacific explorer, fellow of the Royal Society, and culture hero. Cook is a man of myth and anti-myth and double-visioned history. In the history and theatre that colonizers made of him, Cook is the icon of humanistic, scientific empire. For the colonized, at least in the postcolonial period of the late twentieth century, Cook is the icon of the savage violence of empires in their encounters with Native peoples (Dening 2001a). In a sense, the general public and academic historians have been perfectly happy with the James Cook they had in the works of J.C. Beaglehole, Alan Villiers, and Richard Hough, and in literally hundreds of other biographies, histories, and coffee-table books. The



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only debate that seemed to interest them was whether Cook really did discover this or that island and place, or whether he had some secret knowledge of it all from the Portuguese. The general euphoria expressed in the reconstructed Endeavour suggests that culturally we still bathe in the sunshine of Cook’s humanism. Black Australians, Hawaiians, and Māoris don’t have that same sense of euphoria. What the “Natives” thought or did or had done to them is of no great interest when another sort of history has been thought to be “real.” Of course, that is not true for the cross-cultural histories being taught around the world in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (but perhaps not Britain) these past twenty years, nor for the literature and histories creating the present discourse about the encounters between Indigenous peoples and empires in all their forms. However, public perceptions of what happened in two-sided history are at least twenty years behind understandings that are fairly ordinary in academia (Dening 2003b). In those circumstances “debunking” is good publishing theatre. An unsuspecting public can be surprised into noticing a change in the paradigm. In 1992 Gananath Obeyesekere “came out” as the great debunker in his The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Ostensibly, his target was the imperial mythmakers who found self-satisfaction in the fact that savages saw their envoys, notably Cook, as “gods.” Actually Obeyesekere’s target was Marshall Sahlins. Rather self-righteously, Obeyesekere claimed that his own Sri Lankan origins gave him understandings of “Natives” that Sahlins could never have. It is an unpleasant book, wrong on many counts, ignorant of Polynesian religious-political experience, and severely lacking in historical interpretive skills, and it is a book in which theoretical constructs override ethnographic experience. Sahlins had the right to be offended by this personal attack on him. His reply in How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook for Example (1995) leaves no point unanswered, no insult not traded, no argument not closed. I suspect that not many readers have been patient with the detail. But then not many readers, especially reviewers and judges in prizes, had bothered to read Obeyesekere either. Most of reading in any case is the reduction of hundreds of thousands of words to a few sentences. The sentences to which Sahlins will be reduced are more important than all the sentences that will not be read. I would like to leave with one of his own. It goes to explain why How “Natives” Think is something more than

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a self-serving apologia. It holds the passion of four decades of his trying to see the hardest thing of all to see in anthro-history: difference. The ultimate victims, Sahlins says, in depriving them of independence of thought and in submitting their actions to some theoretical and ideological template, is the Hawaiian people themselves: “the Hawaiian people appear on the stage as the dupes of European ideology. Deprived thus of agency and culture, their history is reduced to a classic meaninglessness: they lived and they suffered – and then they died” (1995: 198). Sahlins prefers to give them a “real history” of their own. I have “way-found” my way to much the same conclusion as Marshall. We owe the past – of both sides of the beach, I would say – a “real history” of its own. I put it in different words. We owe the past as historians, we owe the people we observe as anthropologists, their own present, as they actually experience it. Their present – and ours – is always processual, is always in the present participle, I like to say. Ethnography, I have told my students for years, is about the present participle – not life, but living; not gender, but gendering; not culture, but culturing; not science, but sciencing. Not even change, but changing. I came to that conclusion long ago. When I compared the observations of Pacific island living by those who saw it from outside (from their ships or mission stations) and the observations of those who had to enter that living in some way (the beachcombers), I discovered that the set descriptions of roles, rules, and institutions, etc. offered none of the contingencies of the narratives of living experience (who actually marries whom, how tapu are obeyed, the distinctions of power and authority) of those who had left the comfort zones of their own cultures and experienced the behavioural metaphors of others (Dening 1974, 1980). Marshall and I have very different notions of what “real history” is. He will tell you that. He began his contribution, “The Discovery of the True Savage”(1994a), to my own Festschrift with a quotation from Lucian: “This then is my sort of historian … in his writing a foreigner, without city or country, living under his own law only, subject to no kin, nor caring what any man will like or dislike, but laying out the matter as it is” (41). Marshall followed with this: “Perhaps no one would be quicker to take issue with Lucian (or with me) than Greg Dening, since few scholars have explored the dialectic between our present and other peoples’ pasts than he, and perhaps



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no one has made the project of ‘laying out the matter as it is’ seem more chimerical” (ibid.). Marshall, dear friend, I began my MA dissertation on East Pacific prehistory (Dening, 1960b:ii) with this quotation from George Forster (1777): “The learned, at last grown tired of being deceived by the powers of rhetoric and by sophisticated arguments, raised a general cry after a simple collection of facts.” Oh, how proud I was of my distribution maps on “Elongated Ear-Lobes in Polynesia,” of “topknots,” of adze types, of the sweet potato, of pig, dog and chicken, of uninhabited islands, of accidental and deliberate voyages. You, Marshall, will know the “sophisticated arguments” of the likes of Thor Heyerdahl and Andrew Sharp that drove me to map topknots and gene frequencies and elongated earlobes. You will also know, Marshall, because you among anthropologists have practised it more than most, that “being there” for the historian is that feeling for the past that can only be matched by the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years that we sit at the tables in the archives. It is an assurance that our extravagance with time here is rewarded with a sensitivity that comes in no other way. It is an overlaying of images on one another. It is a realization that knowledge of the past is cumulative and kaleidoscopic, extravagantly wasteful of our energy. And it is a pilgrimage. The past doesn’t come to me. I must go to wherever different cultural and social systems conserve it. Where ever that is – London, Paris, Boston, Leningrad, Nantucket, small archives and attics and drawers – it is most preciously on pieces of paper inscribed by pen or pencil in the moments they represent. It is precious to see the love or hate or pride or power in these millions of pieces of paper. But, Marshall, you are correct. The mysterious relationship between past and present has preoccupied my scholarly and professional life both as researcher and writer and as educator of those who will take our place. I use the word “mysterious” advisedly. I like a word some of us have invented, “historying.” History – the past transformed into words or paint or dance or music or play – is our noun. Historying is our verb-noun. Historying is the unclosed action of making histories. History, the noun, is closed, shaped, a product. Historying is process, never done, dialectical, and dialogic. Gossiping, explaining to the taxman, pleading not guilty to the judge, eulogies over the grave – historying actions are manifold, each with a moral dimension. Historying for those of us who

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are likely to be reading this is more defined – not by topic, not by period, not by method, not by style, not by interpretive agreement. None of us is the clone of any other. None of us is the clone of our teachers. None of our students is a clone of us. Our historying is as idiosyncratic as our fingerprints. Are we joined together in our historying, though? Yes, we are I would like to say. Historying is not just making history. It is also educating, supervising, examining, researching, reviewing, being members of professional associations, advising governments and institutions, giving public face to scholarship in the media, sharing the burdens of administration in committees of all descriptions, applying for research grants, being paid for some of it, being freely generous with time and energy for the sake of ideals, being conscious that all this is self-interested in personal ambitions, in institutional rivalries, in the scramble for funded support. There are schemers and frauds and nastiness in such historying. But altruism and ideals suffuse it, too. There is a passion that such knowledge is public, that it be subject to critical appraisal, that it serve a good greater than the individual’s fame (Dening 2002). For me, the joy of these last fifty years of historying (1957–2007) has been something of the exhilaration I had seen in the last fifty years of the eighteenth century (1757–1807). The “Enlightened,” they called themselves. “They dared to know,” as Immanuel Kant said of them. They dared to know by engaging themselves in the naming process of discourse. We know the comfort it brings. The “Enlightenment” of one century is the “structuralism,” “neo-Marxism,” and “postmodernism” of another. The recognition of keywords, a sense of the metaphoric nature of styles of thought, a feeling that what one has just read is what one was about to say, knowing the truth in the caricatures of oppositional stands made by one’s associates, knowing, on the other hand, how untrue the stereotypifications are of oneself – all the stuff by which paradigms are made – have given a wondrous lift to these past fifty years (Dening 1994). Marshall is worried by postmodernism. So am I. I have no use for it either as a literary or any other type of theory. But I am not worried by my postmodernity, or as I prefer to call it, my neo-modernity. My modernity is my respect for both the past and the present as something that has happened and is happening in a particular way independently of our knowing it. My modernity is born of the hundreds of years of knowledge advancement that have entered our



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souls. We see the advantage of perspective, of focused inquiry. We are bound to exhaustive research. My modernity demands that I be engaged at all times in critical dialogue and an effort to filter my knowledge as far as it is humanly possible from prejudice and error. We all have disciplined minds. That is our protection and our inspiration. I never let myself be called “interdisciplinary.” “Multi-disciplinary,” yes. It is my obligation to enter the economies of language and knowledge of all the disciplines I use so as to see their limitations, their ambiguities. But we belong to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We know the fictions of our languaging. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Clifford Geertz, Jacques Derrida, and hundreds of films and novels have told us them. We know both the possibilities and the limits of our knowing. We know how brokenly we know. We know as well that if we begin with the real, we will always have to enlarge it with imagination. This is our renewal of our modernity, our neo-modernity. This makes us different sorts of writers of history. We know our various voices, we know our author-ity. We know all the tricks of representation. This now is our realism, our non-fiction, if you like. It is invidiously selective to give a litany of names one would bless for their inspiration over fifty years of living discourse. But why not? In philosophy and theology: Joseph Maréchal, Teilhard de Chardin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Rahner. In history: Marc Bloch, R.G. Collingwood, R.H. Tawney, E.P. Thompson, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Robert F. Berkhofer, Bernard Smith. In reflective thought: Roland Barthes, Richard Rorty, Michel de Certeau. In anthropology: Claude Lévi-Strauss, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, Richard White, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and of course, Marshall Sahlins. And mentors. Who doesn’t need mentors? John Mulvaney, Harry Maude, Doug Oliver. For me the springtime of these fifty years was 1954–60. Botanists, glottochronologists, geneticists buzzed about the “Polynesian Problem” – where did the Polynesians come from and how? We discovered that disciplines were about creating languages and being comfortable with different sets of blinkers. These were years of innocence in which we read E.D. Merrill on botany, Bengt Anell on fishhooks, Roger Duff on adzes, A.C. Haddon and James Hornell on canoes, Peter H. Buck on material culture, Edwin G. Burrows on boundaries, E.S.C. Handy on religion, and Katherine Luomala on myths in the belief that we were doing history. We felt immodestly

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superior to the antiquarians of the Pacific – Elsdon Best, Percy Smith, and F.W. Christian. Their vast knowledge only served madcap theories about Polynesian origins and movements. In out of the way places from Finland to New Zealand, from Leningrad to Valparaiso, men and women had collected the products of their experience of the Pacific. We felt that there was not an archive or a library or a museum, a learned society or a colonial bureaucracy in all of Europe and the Americas in which ethnographic experience of the Pacific was not texted in some way. That immense variety of texts – logs, diaries, letters, journals, government reports, lectures, books, notes, written-down oral traditions, notes of memories – encapsulated the experience of those who made the texts as well as the otherness of nature and cultures that was experienced. We thought that the peculiar joy of Pacific history was to catch the seers, the seen, and the seeing. So, Marshall, I don’t think the relationship between past and present chimerical. I think it to be mysterious. “Mystery,” mysterium, is a word that comes out of Roman religious practices and sacramental theology. A mystery is a truth that is so complicated that it can only be experienced through play or parable or ritual. It has to be experienced in some way, and it will always be changed or enlarged in the experiencing. Mysteries are never closed. Mystery plays, whether they are of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ or in the calendaric struggle of Lono and Ku, are rarely predictors of behaviour. They are interpretive understandings in the moment after. The relationship between past and present is neither “chimerical” nor an “ever-decreasing hermeneutical circle.” It is a never-ending conversation. No sentence of ours will ever bring it to a full stop (Dening 2006). The present in that dialogue with its past is inevitably political. Aboriginality – a present connectedness or identification with a distanced and greatly different past – is the prime political issue for settler and post-colonial societies that have seen Indigenous peoples dispossessed of their lands, and their cultures consciously destroyed. Historying I take to be those sensual, emotional, mindful, bodily, and spiritual processes by which peoples collectively or personally read the signs of that surrounding metaphoric presence of the past and know that they truly belong to that past and that past truly belongs to them. Historying, for those seeking their Aboriginality in that sense, seems to have too broad a dimension and even an



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invalid one for those opposed to their political aspirations. But that denial itself is more political than ethnographically valid, it seems to me. Our own cultural historying is just as broad, and we have a very precise notion of its different validities in different cultural circumstances. I like to think of a phenomenology of the past, much in the same way as Walter Ong (1982: 73) wrote of the phenomenology of sound in an oral culture – its centring, surrounding action, rather than its directional qualities. The past, especially in traditional societies, like sound, is a surrounding, suffusing cultural environment of recognizable metaphors. That ever-present past is I. That everpresent past is We. Historying, in my understanding, is a common, everyday phenomenon. It is Everyperson’s fine sense of the poetics of their history making (Dening 1990). In the springtime, the years 1954–60, and now in the autumn, the years 2004–07, of my engagement with what I have learned to call the Sea of Islands, I met up with, and now have come to recognize in a new light, a most remarkable man: Tupaia was his name (Dening 1986, 1989; Salmond 2003: 113–34; Thomas 1997: 1–5; Williams 2003). I would like to tell his story as an example of the dialogue between present and past in the broad sense of this historying. In 1769 Tupaia created an image of the phenomenology of the past of the Sea of Islands: he drew a map. Tupaia was a priest from the sacred island of Ra‘iātea in the Tahitian cluster of islands. He was a priest in the formal sense of that word. He was a man of establishment, a guardian of tradition, a master of ceremony and ritual, and a man of sacrifice. In saying Tupaia was a priest, we are saying that he was not a prophet. The gods did not possess him, make him shiver and quake and speak in tongues, or manipulate good and evil fortunes. No, Tupaia was a priest, a political manager of supernatural worlds. Tupaia was a priest of ‘Oro. ‘Oro had come to the sacred island of Ra‘iātea on a rainbow. ‘Oro, as a feathered thing, travelled around the islands in his canoe called Rainbow. Rainbows, feathers, canoes – all of ‘Oro’s symbols were of crossings, between heavens and earth, air and ground, sea and land. ‘Oro’s temples were places of crossings. They stood on points of land looking to an opening in the reef. Taputapuātea was their name, Sacrifices from Abroad. Taputapuātea had narratives in their architecture about crossing beaches, about encounters in place, about assuaging violent power. ‘Oro’s canoe, bearing sacrifices on its prow, would beach itself on the Seaward

Figure 9.1a.  Tupaia’s chart. Drawn by Emily Brissenden, after 1.133, p. 130, in The Charts and Coastal Views of Captain Cook’s Voyages, vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771, ed. Andrew David (London: Hakluyt Society, 1988).

Figure 9.1b.  Identifiable islands on Tupaia’s chart. Drawn by Emily Brissenden.

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side of Taputapuātea. Standing on a stone between the Seaward side and the Landward side, his feet too sacred to stand on the ground around, the ari‘i nui, the high chief, would eat the eyes of the sacrifices. That would soften the violence in him. He would then be wrapped in the feathered symbols of ‘Oro, be given his titles, and established in his authority by that. Then in a world turned upside down, he would have shit and semen poured over him, and be taught his proper place in the order of things by that, be made the shit of gods. On the Landward side of Taputapuātea was a place of communion. Sacrifice and communion always go together. It was a place of feasting. It was also a treasure house of sacred paraphernalia and memory. It was a place where traditions were sung and souvenirs of encounters were kept. A portrait of James Cook by John Webber was kept in the Taputapuātea at Matavai through all these years, as well as the red hair of the Bounty barber, as well as the skulls of two mutineers killed on the island. These Taputapuātea were Pacific representations of the sort of crossings that, in an island world, had to be made between sea and land. It was a liturgical map of the beach. Tupaia was the manager of the theatre of these sacred spaces. In fact, in 1760 he had brought from Ra‘iātea one of those stones on which the ari‘i stood to receive the sacrifices. That stone was the foundation stone transported from Taputapuātea on Ra‘iātea to Taputapuātea on Tahiti. I think that simple fact significant. Tupaia knew the civilizing processes in his own Native islands well. Tupaia knew the virtual realities of abstractions, the subjunctive world, the “as if” world of the reifications of state, kingship, law, economy. Tupaia would easily translate flags, uniforms, military order, and the theatre of power into something he understood. Tupaia first met the other world that would change his world forever in July 1767. It was at Matavai on the northwest coast of Tahiti. Captain Samuel Wallis’s Dolphin had been anchored there for a couple of weeks. They had been a terrible few weeks. The “Dolphins” had killed they did not know how many islanders – as many as a flock of birds, a shoal of fish, the Tahitians said. Tupaia came to Matavai when the relations between the English and the Tahitians were more settled. He came with Purea whom the English took to be Queen. They presumed they had killed her King in the first massacre. Purea, they would say, gave them Tahiti. Tupaia came with



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Purea from the Taputapuātea he had established for her. They came with Purea’s son, who held from his father and his mother the highest title on the island. They had already begun their translation of their encounter with the English. They would incorporate the flag of possession that Wallis had erected in Matavai into the sacred feather girdle of ‘Oro that would be wrapped around the ari‘i nui on his Taputapuātea stone. James Cook would later see it among the sacred treasures of ‘Oro’s temple and William Bligh was to draw it. When Tupaia boarded the Dolphin, the “Dolphins” sensed he was of superior rank, even a priest. They gave him the name Jonathan. Tupaia was curious about everything on board the ship. He learned things by touching and handling them, sometimes the hard way – that a teapot held boiling water, for example. A cameo portrait of Wallis’s wife sent him into raptures. It was a fascination with representation that never left him, as we shall see. The officers of the Dolphin fussed over him. They sat him down to dinner, a large dinner – chicken broth, roast fowl, roast pork, roast yams, plantains, bananas, soft bread, biscuit, apple pudding, apple pie, and a cup of tea. Tupaia mimicked the etiquette around the table, and was embarrassed when he got things wrong, like putting his fingers in the butter, or as they invited him to do for the laugh of it, wipe his mouth on the tablecloth, since he did not have a pocket handkerchief such as they used. There is much of the civilizing process in the private spaces of good table manners. Norbert Elias has taught us that. There is also much hegemony in the laughter at bungled Native mimicry of civilized ways. The Dolphins decked out their “Jonathan” in a complete suit of clothing before they left. In this garb and to their patronizing smiles, he returned to the beach and there delighted a large crowd of islanders with the theatre of his encounter. Tupaia’s next encounter was with James Cook and Joseph Banks. Tupaia’s political status had changed between the visit of the Dolphin and the visit of the Endeavour, but his usefulness to Cook and Banks was greatly enlarged. He was their guide, interpreter, and informant. In the end Banks decided to take Tupaia back to England. He would not cost as much as the lions and tigers his neighbours collected, Banks mused. Every encounter of the Endeavour with Indigenous peoples from that moment on was mediated by Tupaia – through the central

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Pacific, all around New Zealand’s north and south islands, all along the eastern coast of Australia. By the time they leave Australia, Tupaia’s body is scoured and bruised with scurvy. It has no immunity left against the fevers of Batavia. Tupaia is one of the first of thirty-six of Cook’s men to die there. Not before leaving us with a brilliant heritage, however. In the great cabin of the Endeavour, Tupaia saw James Cook bending over his chart table. He saw Sydney Parkinson, the painter, at his easel working his oils and watercolours. So Tupaia made a map of his ocean world, and he started painting. In his map and in his paintings we have Tupaia equipping himself with new skills to represent something old within him. They are Pacific representations of extraordinary brilliance, it seems to me. As Tupaia acted as the master of ceremonies for all of Cook’s encounters with Indigenous peoples, he insisted on the protocols that needed to be observed. Respect and reverence in body gesture and pose, exchange of true gifts not trade, and obeisance to the true titles of the place in that sacred space where they resided. (Marshall, a small note for you: I think that Cook after the disasters of the encounters to this point on this Third Voyage, remembered the instructions Tupaia gave him at Ra‘iātea and followed them at Kealakeua. Hence, all his out-of-character gestures as “Lono.”) In all of Tupaia’s encounters, he would engage himself in discussion of the titles and origins of the places he visited. It made him famous throughout New Zealand. Among the Māori, Tupaia was remembered for generations longer than Cook. The Māori named a cave for him where he slept, a well that he dug, and their children after him. For many years there has been a series of painting from the Endeavour identified only as by “The Artist of the Chief Mourner.” Just a few years ago, a note was discovered in Joseph Banks’s papers saying that “The Artist of the Chief Mourner” was Tupaia. By that they become an extraordinary archive of the 1769 encounter. Like his map of the Ocean of Titles, Tupaia’s paintings focus on the larger narratives of Tahitian life (Williams 2003). We have Tupaia’s map painting of Taputapuātea. He draws the Seaward sacrificial space separate from the Landward feasting and memorializing space, with ‘Oro’s canoe, Rainbow, in between. We have his depiction of long-distance navigational canoes and, in the background, the vegetable foods they brought: plantain, coconuts,



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and breadfruit. And we have the meeting place where their stories were told, As well as the war canoes. The sea was without the order of the land. We have the theatre of Tahitian memories – the musicians and the dancers. When Tupaia was in New Zealand, he painted the theatre of gift exchange, ruled over by the eye, the source of power. On the Australian coast, Tupaia was intrigued by the primitiveness of the canoes and the utter nakedness of the people. He painted a picture of the Gweagal people fishing Botany Bay – a vision of one about-to-be-colonized people of another about-to-be-colonized people. Tupaia called the Gweagal ta‘ata ino, “rubbish,” as the pool of sacrificial victims was called in Tahiti. He painted them deeply black: blackness unbleached by the cosmetics of the elite was the sign of their victimhood. And he saw their eyes. Tupaia always saw the eyes (Smith 1985). I find it hard to contain my wonder and awe at these Pacific repre­sentations, these transformations of Tupaia’s self into something else. All the way from Tahiti to Batavia, in whatever direction the Endeavour sailed or in whatever foreign conditions it reached, Tupaia always knew the direction of home and its distance. When the ship reached Batavia, the first thing that Tupaia noticed was that all the different peoples, different in their colour and their looks, wore their different Native costumes. Tupaia looked at himself and saw himself in the slops of ship’s clothing. He threw them away and dressed himself in his Native tapa cloth. That was his last gesture of identity; he died wrapped in the red tapa of his ari‘i and priestly status. James Cook arrived in the Sea of Islands in the Endeavour in 1769. He was there to observe the Transit of Venus. He was part of a longue durée of science that joined an ancient Greek, Eratosthenes, measuring the size of the earth from the shadows of poles in different places at noon, with Cook making his observations to measure the size of the universe from the solar parallax. Cook, of course, was observing the unobservable. He was not observing the extent of the universe. He was observing the evermore finely calibrated instruments and socializing himself to the “as if” world of his measuring, and immersing himself in a special language, and he came out realizing that he had seen unseeable distances (Dening 1995). Cook, however, was mystified. He did not yet know the vastness of the ocean around him. He did, however, know that only a few

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islands had been “discovered” to the European mind. Cook was to come to realize that there was not one island (from among some 10,000 to 15,000 of them) that had not been settled or visited, he knew not how many years before him. As it happened, Cook was to meet this genius among the Tahitians, Tupaia, who would tell him something of what he did not know. He told Cook of some 147 islands in the Sea of Islands that he knew of. He offered to draw Cook a map of them. Let’s look at Tupaia’s map (see Figures 9.1a and 9.1b). We don’t have Tupaia’s original drawing of his map. It has been lost. We only have English interpretations of it. Or rather we only have English misinterpretations of it. Tupaia’s Ocean of Islands arcs across 7,000 kilometres of the central Pacific, from the Marquesas in the east to the Fijis in the west. There are islands to which he himself has sailed – most remarkably, islands ten days’ sailing to the west from which it takes thirty days’ sailing against the prevailing winds to return. There are islands 600 kilometres across open sea to the south to which Tupaia pilots the Endeavour with pinpoint accuracy. A great number of the 70 islands on the map (he originally named 147) we can’t identify. Mostly this is probably because the names are as archaic as the knowledge they represent. There is something else as well. Tupaia’s map, as I now understand it, is an Ocean of Titles, or of sacred places where titles reside. It is these titles that Tupaia instructed Cook to acknowledge (Dening 1962; David 1988: 130–3; Forster 1996: 303–16; Finney 1998). Tupaia’s original map was a stilled moment in 1769 in the phenomenology of a 2,000-year past. Now, in these first decades of the third millennium, Tupaia’s map is an icon of how the present-day Sea Peoples of the Sea of Islands join themselves to it in their Aboriginality. I first studied Tupaia’s map over fifty years ago. It was a brilliant and innocent time of my academic life, as I have said. It was innocent because we thought that our expertise somehow gave us ownership of the past. I suppose it has been the most important lesson of my life to learn that the past belongs first to those on whom it impinges, and that one function of our expertise is to help give voice to those who truly own the past. At the time, fifty years ago, we were preoccupied by the thesis of a curmudgeon New Zealand scholar, Andrew Sharp (1956), who argued that the Pacific was peopled by accident. The legends of its



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peopling were pure myth, he claimed. We were innocent, too, in thinking that our argument with Sharp was purely academic. We did not understand how politically destructive Sharp’s thesis was to Pacific island, especially the Māori, cultural self-esteem. I just thought him wrong (Dening 1960a). I showed him to be wrong in my first performance of respectfulness. Respectful – and a sense of wonder. I had the deepest sense of admiration for this Sea People and their skills. I do all my sailing; I meet all my “Natives,” in the library. I’ve always felt that humility is a virtue that both historians and anthropologists should have. We live others’ lives so vicariously. We enter others’ metaphors so superficially. We need to be humble. We need to be respectful. That first act of respect, born of a trust that there was historical truth that I could discover in this past that engulfed the islanders, was to scour all the archival sources I could to discover all voyaging by Pacific Islanders done without European navigational technology. These voyages could be accidental or deliberate. I made a map of 218 of them (Dening 1962: 137–53). That map of 218 voyages allowed me to say how long deliberate voyages over open ocean could be, about 600 kilometres. Accidental voyages were not necessarily catastrophic because of the islanders’ capacity to make a landfall within a 300-kilometre circumference of even the lowest atoll. After that I had no doubt that these Sea People had made their Sea of Islands their own. They trade. They raid. They adventure. They way-find. They have an artifact of cultural genius to do it all, their va‘a, their canoe. Fifty years on, I read Tupaia’s map differently. In 1769 Tupaia was answering Cook’s questions. In 1954 I was countering Sharp’s arguments about the truth of Tupaia’s map. Now I look with even more wonderment at that map. A 2,000-year past is there, like sound, a surrounding presence in that map. Its historiography is of all the ways these islands came into the mind of one man, Tupaia, and was made present by stories told, by dancing them, by ritual memorializing. Tupaia annotated his map orally to Cook with stories of these islands, but Cook wasn’t interested in anything else than their direction and distance. In contrast, when Tupaia went to Aotearoa with the Endeavour, all he told the Māori of the Sea of Islands from which their ancestors came intrigued them. Tupaia is famous still among the Māori. Places and children are named after him (Dening 2004a, 2004b).

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Let me tell how present-day people of the Sea of Islands seek their Aboriginality inherent in the metaphor thatTupaia’s map holds. Let me say first that it would be fraudulent of me to insinuate that this story is about my engagement in the issue alone. There are scholars whom I admire immensely standing beside me here. To mention only a few: Thomas Gladwin (1970), David Lewis (1972), Patrick Kirch (2000), Roger and Kaye Green (1968), Patrick Kirch and Roger Green (2001), and Geoffrey Irwin (1992). In 1975 a friend of mine, Ben Finney, a fellow Harvard anthropology graduate, began a project for much the same reason that I had begun my studies of Tupaia’s map: to prove Andrew Sharp wrong. He wanted to do this by building a Hawaiian voyaging canoe and to sail, without intrusive navigational knowledge or instruments, the epic voyages of the island ancestors – between Hawai‘i and Tahiti, between Tahiti and Aotearoa, and between Fenua‘enata and Hawai‘i and Rapanui (Easter Island). These voyages have been an extraordinary achievement. There is no point in being romantic about them. The thirty years of this odyssey have had their pain and conflict, their tragedies and failures, their political machinations, their greed, and their absurdities. They also have been courageous overall triumphs, tapping wellsprings of cultural pride in a sense of continuity with a voyaging tradition. This has not just been in Hawai‘i, but in Tahiti, Samoa, and Aotearoa as well. Everywhere that he has gone it has been the same. The landfall has been a theatre of who island peoples are, who they have been (Finney 1994, 2003). I would like to go to 1995 when the theatre of this re-enactment voyaging came to a climax. Seven voyaging canoes collected at the sacred island of Ra‘iātea in the Tahitian group. Ra‘iātea was Tupaia’s island. There Tupaia had given Cook his first lesson in the protocols for a first encounter with islanders. On the shining liminal space of a beach where the waves soak into the sand – a space where important Tahitian ritual transformations were staged – Cook had been instructed to show respect by disrobing in some way, then he should offer pure gifts, not trade, then offer some sacrifice in the sacred space where the titles of possession of the island were kept. At Ra‘iātea was also Taputapuātea, perhaps the most sacred place in all the Sea of Islands, a place of sacrifice. Tupaia was its priest. The re-enactment voyages had long outlived their function as simply an argument against Sharp’s denial of their possibility. They



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had become signs of the living vitality of a long cultural past. The re-enactment voyages had become empowering metaphors of identity. That identity was a conjoined one – not just a sense of the legitimacy of their continuity with individual island cultures, but an identity of shared Nativeness to the Sea of Islands, and identity reaching back to that first remarkable voyage from Tonga to Fenua‘enata (the Marquesas). The accidents of my own intellectual engagement take me to this re-enactment theatre (Dening 2003a). If young islander scholars, and indeed their elders, were beside me here, they would be taking you to their poetry, their novels, and their plays. Or they would be describing to you their experiments in historiography in their doctoral theses. Their histories, they would tell you, are things of both mind and body. Their science is to be artful. They express their historiography in new modes, like dancing. Most of all, I think, they would be exposing to you the treasure trove of their languages to show to you how they are continually discovering that the English words they use, like past, future, history, time, and space, are infused with meanings that let them know how different they are from the hegemonic culture in their Aboriginality (Hereniko 1995, Kame‘eleihiwa 1992, Teaiwa 1994, Trask 1999, Wood 2003). Taputapuātea was an ideal place to play at this conjoined identity for the seven canoes (see Finney 1999; Dening 2004a, 2004b). The mythic songs the voyagers chanted were anthems of union and treaty. The themes of these chants were recognizable from as far away as Aotearoa, Tonga, and Hawai‘i. I suppose one of the greatest pleasures in these autumnal years of my scholarly life has been to describe that first settlement voyage (2,000 years ago) from Tonga to Fenua‘enata. The marvel of that voyage is that the twelve or so adults who made it had in their minds, bodies, and spirits all that we came to see as “Polynesia” from Aotearoa to Hawai‘i to Rapanui east of Tonga and Samoa. Catharsis, it seems to me is not a piecemeal thing. It is whole and one. It is a reduction of complexity to simplicity in a blink. Rituals, on the other hand, can be piecemeal, blaring, empty, contradictory, driven by many forces. So the ritual at Taputapuātea to welcome and send off the voyaging canoes was uncomfortable, hot, and boring to many there. The French powers-that-be were inclined to speak of such rituals as “folkloric” and bend to the politics in them with some cynicism, born of the belief that they are at least a boost to

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tourism. So at Taputapuātea, anti-nuclear protest songs competed electronically with ancient chants and fundamentalist Christian hymns expressing dismay at modern libertarianism. The experience of thousands was kaleidoscopic. But the catharsis was not. As the thousands took their leave, the social memory of it was one. They had looked at the past and seen the future. They were confident that their living culture was a metaphoric thing and that they had seen the metaphor at work in the Sea of Islands. These past twelve years I have become an “adjunct professor.” I don’t know what “adjuncting” is, but I do it very conscientiously. It is a sort of academic grandparenting. Young scholars come to me. We enjoy one another for a short time, and we all go home. I engage these young doctoral students from all disciplines and professions, from archaeology to zoology, in their creative imagination in the presentation of their scholarly knowledge. I challenge them to perform that knowledge in ways that they have never tried. I like as well to present them with the lights of the university also in performance mode – the professor of dancing beside the professor of astrophysics, the professor of literature beside the professor of anthropology, the professor of music composition beside the professor of history. None of us can speak to our expertise in such varied company, only to our experience, our ideals, our disappointments, our successes and failures, our tricks of trade (Dening 1992, 2000). Respectfulness, I tell them, is a performance art. You have to wonder a little in order to understand, to admire in order to enter someone else’s metaphor. You have to be silent to listen. You have to know yourself to know others. All of us are storytellers, I tell them. True storytellers, tellers of true stories, whether we are measuring the edges of the universe, whether we are sifting the dirt in our archaeological pits, or whether we are historying. We observe. We reflect. We write. We claim authority but have no other power than to persuade. We make theatre about trivial and everyday things, and about awful and cruel realities. Maybe we write to change the world. We tell our stories, but there is never any closure to them. There is always another sentence to the conversation that we have joined. There is always another slant on the story that we have told. We live by our creativity and originality, but we cannot plumb the depth of our



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intellectual and cultural plagiarism. Plato, Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and so many others are in our minds somewhere. So is our postmodernity, whether we like it or not. We know – because our everyday living performances are never separated from our academic performances – how liberated we have been by the painters, dancers, composers, film directors, novelists, and poets on our cultural horizons. Just by being everyday cultural performers in our own times we know that performance art engages the whole body, all the senses, all the emotions. Not just the mind, not just rationality. Performance art has given us a multitude of narrative strategies for our stories. We know that formulaic monotone won’t do what we want it to do – persuade, convince, change, enter into somebody else’s consciousness in a meaningful way. We have to be artful. We must take out the cliché, not just from our concepts and words, but from the very structure of our presentations. To be read, we must write to the tropes of our times (Dening 1990, 1993, 2002). Our ethnographies – our histories – I tell them must be art. There is no art in multiplying the reifications. Art is the dismantling of reifications. In art there is one cultural miracle. Every difference has a sameness. Every smallness a largeness. Every shape, every colour, every gesture a theory. In a performance art we need the directness of a novelist, the choosiness of a poet, the discontinuity of a filmmaker, the engagement of a violinist.

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Bibliography Most Things Written by Marshall Sahlins, So Far Works by Sahlins as Sole Author 1955. “Esoteric Efflorescence in Easter Island.” American Anthropologist 57(5): 1045–52. 1956. “Review of Energy and Society.” American Anthropologist 58(6): 449–62. 1957a. “Differentiation by Adaptation in Polynesian Societies.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 66(3): 291–300. 1957b. “Land Use and Extended Family in Moala, Fiji.” American Anthropologist 59(3): 449–62. 1958. Social Stratification in Polynesia. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1959. “Social Life of Monkeys, Apes, and Primitive Man.” Human Biology 31: 54–73. 1960a. “Evolution: Specific and General.” In Evolution and Culture, ed. Marshall Sahlins, Elman Service, and Thomas Harding, 12–44. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1960b. “Political Power and the Economy in Primitive Society.” In Essays in the Science of Culture, ed. Gertrude Dole, 390–415. New York: Crowell. 1960c. “The Origin of Society.” Scientific American 203(3): 76–88. 1960d. “Production, Distribution and Power in a Primitive Society.” In Men and Cultures: Selected Papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, September 1–9,1956, ed. Anthony Wallace, 495–500. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. 1961. “The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion.” American Anthropologist 63(2): 322–45.

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1962a. Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1962b. “Review of African Genesis by Robert Ardrey.” Scientific American 207: 169–74. 1962c. “Review Essay: On Sociological Aspects of Economic Growth by B.F. Hoselitz.” American Anthropologist 64(5): 1063–73. 1963a. “Remarks on Social Structure in Southeast Asia.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 72(1): 39–50. 1963b. “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 5(3): 285–303. 1964a. “African Nemesis: An Off-Broadway Review.” Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 30: 83–100. 1964b. “Culture and Environment.” In Horizons of Anthropology, ed. Sol Tax, 132–47. Chicago: Aldine. 1964c. “Reply to Derek Freeman.” American Anthropologist 66(3): 612–22. 1965a. “Exchange-Value and the Diplomacy of Primitive Trade.” In Essays in Economic Anthropology, ed. June Helm, 95–129. Seattle: American Ethnological Society. 1965b. “On the Ideology and Composition of Descent Groups.” Man 65: 104–7. 1965c. “On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange.” In The Relevance of Models for Social Anthropology, ed. Michael Banton, 139–236. Edinburgh: Tavistock. 1965d. “Once You’ve Broken Him Down…” The Nation, 25 Oct.: 266–9. 1966a. “The Destruction of Conscience in Vietnam.” Dissent 13(1): 36–62. 1966b. “On the Delphic Writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss.” Scientific American 204: 131–6. 1966c. “The Peace Offensive and the Ky Regime.” Labor Today 5(2): 1–3. 1968a. “The Established Order, Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate.” In The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot, ed. Irving Horowitz, 71–9. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1968b. “La première société d’adondance.” Les Temps modernes 268: 641–80. 1968c. “Philosophie politique de ‘L’essai sur le don.’” L’Homme 8(4): 5–17. – 1968d. Tribesmen. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 1969a. “Economic Anthropology and Anthropological Economics.” Social Science Information 8(5): 13–33. 1969b. “Notes on the Original Affluent Society.” In Man the Hunter, ed. Richard B. Lee and Irven Devore, 85–93. Chicago: Aldine.

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1970. “The Spirit of the Gift: Une Explication De Texte” In Mélanges Lévi-Strauss, ed. Jean Pouillon, 998–1012. Paris: Mouton. 1971. “The Intensity of Domestic Production in Primitive Societies: Social Inflections of the Chayanov Slope.” In Studies in Economic Anthropology, ed. George Dalton, 30–51. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association. 1972. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton. 1975. “The Apotheosis of Captain Cook.” Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 53/54: 1–31. 1976a. “Colors and Cultures.” Semiotica 16(1): 1–22. 1976b. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1976c. “Reply to Allen Berger, Structural and Eclectic Revisions of Marxist Strategy.” Current Anthropology 17(2): 298–300. 1976d. The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1977. “The State of the Art in Social/Cultural Anthropology: Search for an Object. In Perspectives on Anthropology, ed. Anthony Wallace, 14–32. Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association. 1978b. “Culture as Protein and Profit.” New York Review of Books 25(18): 45–8. 1979. “The Apotheosis of Captain Cook.” In La Fonction symbolique: Essais d’anthropologie, ed. Michel Izard and Pierre Smith. Paris: Gallimard. 1980. “Other Times, Other Customs: The Anthropology of History.” American Anthropologist 85(3): 517–44. 1981a. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1981b. “The Stranger-King: Or Dumezil among the Fijians.” Journal of Pacific History 16(3): 107–32. 1982a. “The Apotheosis of Captain Cook.” In Between Belief and Transgression: Structuralist Essays in Religion, History, and Myth, ed. Michel Izard and Pierre Smith, 73–103. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1982b. “Individual Experience and the Cultural Order.” In The Social Sciences: Their Nature and Uses, ed. William Kruskel, 35–48. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1983a. “Raw Women, Cooked Men, and Other ‘Great Things’ of the Fiji Islands.” In The Ethnography of Cannibalism, ed. Paula Brown and Donald Tuzin, 72–93. Washington, DC: Society for Psychological Anthropology. 1983b. “Structure and History.” Suomen Antropologi 3: 118–27. 1985a. Islands of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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1985b. “Hierarchy and Humanity in Polynesia.” In Transformations of Polynesian Culture, ed. Anthony Hooper and Judith Huntsman, 195– 217. Auckland: Polynesian Society. 1987. “War in the Fiji Islands: The Force of Custom, and the Custom of Force.” In International Ethics in the Nuclear Age, ed. Robert J Myers, 229– 328. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. 1988a. “Deserted Islands of History.” Critique of Anthropology 8(3): 41–51. 1988b. “Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of ‘the World System.’” Proceedings of the British Academy 74: 1–51. 1989. “Captain Cook at Hawaii.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 98(4): 371–425. 1990a. “China Reconstructing or Vice Versa: Humiliation as a Stage of Economic ‘Development,’ with Comments on Cultural Diversity in the Modern World.” In Toward One World Beyond All Barriers, ed. Byong-Ik Koh, 78–96. Seoul: Seoul Olympic Sports Promotion Foundation. 1990b. “The Political Economy of Grandeur in Hawaii from 1810 to 1830.” In Culture Through Time: Anthropological Approaches, ed. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, 26–56. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1991a. “Fred Eggan: History and Structure.” Anthropology Today 8(1): 23–5. 1991b. “The Return of the Event, Again.” In Clio in Oceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology, ed. Aletta Biersack, 37–99. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1992a. “The Economics of Develop-Man in the Pacific.” Res 21: 13–25. 1992b. “The Remembered Landscape of O’ahu.” In Pacific History: Papers from the Eighth Annual Pacific History Association Conference, ed. Donald Rubinstein, 419–28. Mangilao, Guam: University of Guam Press and Micronesian Area Research Center. 1993a. “Cery cery fuckabede.” American Ethnologist 20(4): 848–67. 1993b. “Good-bye to Tristes Tropes: Ethnography in the Context of Modern World History.” Journal of Modern History 65: 1–25. 1994a. “The Discovery of the True Savage.” In Dangerous Liaisons: Essays in Honour of Greg Dening, ed. Donna Marwick, 41–94. Parkville: University of Melbourne Press. 1994b. “Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of ‘The World System.’” [1989] In Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas Dirks, Sherry Ortner, and Geoff Eley, 412–55. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1995. How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook, for Example. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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1996. “The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology.” Current Anthropology 37(3): 395–415. 1997. “Forum on Theory in Anthropology.” Current Anthropology 38(2): 272–6. 1999a. Waiting for Foucault and Other Aphorisms. Charlottesville, VA: Prickly Pear Pamphlets. 1999b. “What Is Anthropological Enlightenment?” Annual Review of Anthropology 28: 1–33. 1999c. “Two or Three Things that I Know about Culture.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5(3): 399–421. 2000a. “On the Anthropology of Modernity, or, Some Triumphs of Culture over Despondency Theory.” In Culture and Sustainable Development in the Pacific, ed. Anthony Hooper, 44–61. Canberra: Asia Pacific Press. 2000b. “‘Sentimental Pessimism’ and Ethnographic Experience: Why Culture Is Not a Disappearing Object.” In Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. Lorraine Daston, 158–202. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000c. Culture in Practice: Selected Essays. New York: Zone Books. 2000d. “Jungle Fever: Review of Darkness in El Dorado.” Washington Post Book World, 10 December. https://www.washingtonpost. com/archive/entertainment/books/2000/12/10/jungle-fever/ e8b757ae-b365-4632-8f04-3d9e61371ed7/. 2001. “Reports of the Deaths of Cultures Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.” In What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought, ed. Howard Marchitello, 189–214. New York: Routledge. 2002a. “Endangered Specificities: An Interview with Marshall Sahlins, 16 October 2001.” Journals of Social Archaeology 2(3): 283–97. 2002b. Waiting for Foucault, Still. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. 2003. “Artificially Maintained Controversies.” Anthropology Today 19(3): 3–5. 2004a. Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2004b. “An Empire of a Certain Kind.” In The World Trade Center and Global Crisis: Critical Perspectives, ed. Bruce Kapferer, 5–10. New York: Berghahn. 2005a. “Hierarchy, Equality, and the Sublimation of Anarchy.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_ documents/a–to–z/s/Sahlins_2007.pdf.

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2005b. “Hierarkia, tasa-arvo ja anarkian sublimaatio: Länsimainen illuusio ihmisluonnosta.” Suomen Antropologi 30(4): 3–18. 2005d. “Preface.” Ethnohistory 52(1): 3–6. 2005e. “Structural Work: How Microhistories Become Macrohistories and Vice Versa.” Anthropological Theory 5(1): 5–30. 2008a. “The Conflicts of the Faculty.” Anthropology News 49(1): 5–6. 2008b. “Leslie A. White.” New York Times Magazine, 19 Sept., MM82. 2008c. “The Stranger-King or, Elementary Forms of the Politics of Life.” Indonesia and the Malay World 36(105): 177–99. 2008d. The Western Illusion of Human Nature. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. 2008e. “Interview with Marshall Sahlins.” Anthropological Theory 8(3): 319–28. 2009a. “In the Absence of the Metaphysical Field: An Interview with Marshall Sahlins.” http://ucexchange.uchicago.edu/interviews/ sahlins.html. 2009b. “The Teach-Ins: Anti-War Protest in the Old Stoned Age.” Anthropology Today 25(1): 3–5. 2009c. “The Conflicts of the Faculty.” Critical Inquiry 35(4): 997–1018. 2010a. “Infrastructuralism.” Critical Inquiry 36(3): 371–85. 2010b. “The Whole Is a Part: Intercultural Politics of Order and Change.” In Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology, ed. Ton Otto and Niles Bubandt, 102–26. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. 2011a. “Twin-Born with Greatness: The Dual Kingship of Sparta.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1(1): 63–101. 2011b. “What Kinship Is (Part One).” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(1): 2–19. 2011c. “What Kinship Is (Part Two).” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(2): 227–42. 2011d. “Iraq: The State-of-Nature Effect.” Anthropology Today 27(3): 26–31. 2011e. “The Alterity of Power and Vice Versa, with Reflections on Stranger-Kings and the Real-Politics of the Marvelous.” In Power in History: From Medieval Ireland to the Post-Modern World, ed. Anthony McElligott, Liam Chambers, Ciara Breathnach, and Catherine Lawless, 283–308. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. 2012a. “Alterity and Autochthony: Austronesian Cosmologies of the Marvelous.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 131–60. 2012b. “Introduction to the New Edition: J. Prytz Johansen: Kant among the Maori.” In The Maori and His Religion in Its Non-Ritualistic Aspects [1954], ed. J. Prytz Johansen, viii–x. Manchester: HAU.

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2012c. “Discours de réception du doctorat honoris causa de l’université Paris-Descartes.” In La Culture et les Sciences de l’Homme: Un Dialogue avec Marshall Sahlins, ed. Erwan Dianteill, 241–52. Paris: Archives Karéline. 2013a. What Kinship Is – and Is Not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013b. “Human Science.” London Review of Books 35(9): 29–32. 2013c. “Foreword.” In Beyond Nature and Culture, by Phillipe Descola, xi– xiv. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013d. “Dear Colleagues – And Other Colleagues.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(3): 337–47. 2013e. “Difference.” Oceania 83(3): 281–94. 2013f. “China U.” The Nation, 13 Nov.: 37–41. 2013g. “On the Culture of Material Value and the Cosmography of Riches.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(2): 161–95. 2014a. “On the Ontological Scheme of Beyond Nature and Culture.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(1): 281–90. 2014b. “Stranger Kings in General: The Cosmo-logics of Power.” In Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds, ed. Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad, 137–63. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2015a. “An Anthropological Manifesto: Or, the Origin of the State.” Anthropology Today 31(2): 8–11. 2015b. Confucius Institutes: Academic Malware. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

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Contributors

Manuela Carneiro da Cunha is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, as well as the University of Sã0 Paulo. She is also a member of the Brazilian Academy of Science. Her books include Negros, estrangeiros: Os escravos libertos e sua volta à Africa and História dos índios no Brasil. Greg Dening was the Max Crawford Professor of History at the University of Melbourne and adjunct professor at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University, Canberra. His books include Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self and Church Alive! Pilgrimages of Faith 1956–2006. Ann Fienup-Riordan is an independent scholar associated with the Calista Elders Council in Anchorage, Alaska. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1980 and has authored a dozen books on Yup’ik peoples. Jonathan Friedman is a professor of anthropology at the University of California at San Diego and Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He has conducted research in Hawai‘i and the Republic of Congo. Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of Leviathans at the Gold Mine. Martha Kaplan is a professor of anthropology at Vassar College specializing in the study of ritual and colonial and post-colonial

292 Contributors

societies. She has done research in Fiji, India, the United States, and Singapore. Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mend Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories; Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter ; and Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. John D. Kelly is a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He does research in Fiji and in India, on topics including ritual in history, knowledge and power, semiotic and military technologies, colonialism and capitalism, decolonization and diasporas. Claude Lévi-Strauss was one of the greatest anthropologists of the twentieth century. A founder of structuralism, he held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France and was a member of the Académie Française. Jocelyn Linnekin is a professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut. She studies ethnological theory, gender, cultural identity and nationalism, historical anthropology, and comparative politics as well as the Pacific Islands, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Joel Robbins is the Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University. He has carried out research focused on Christianity and cultural change among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea and the rapid globalization of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. Daniel Rosenblatt is an assistant professor of anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa. He has conducted research in Aotearoa/ New Zealand on the performance and experience of local cultural traditions and identities in the context created by such transnational forces as capitalism, colonialism, modernity, and globalization. Serge Tcherkézoff is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he specializes in the study of Samoa and in the history of European colonialism in the Pacific. His books in English include Oceanic Encounters, which he co-edited with Margaret Jolly and Darrell Tyron, and “First Contacts” in Polynesia.

Index

Aboriginal peoples. See Indigenous peoples Afghanistan, 25, 28 Africa, 123–4, 229 African Genesis (Ardrey, 1962), 11 Ahutoru, 144–5 Alaska, 24, 34, 182–202 Alaska National Guard, 191 Alaska State Department of History and Archaeology, 199 Alaska State Department of Transportation (DOT), 182, 185, 190–1, 199, 201–2 alcoholism, 159, 161, 168 Alexie, Eddie, 188 Almeida, Eulalia, 179n5 Amazon (state), 164 Amazon River, 155 American Anthropological Association, 9 Amsterdam, 206 A Mystificação Salexiana (Bandeira, 1923), 167 Anahulu (Sahlins, 1992), 4, 10, 21, 178–9, 242

Anatolia, 95 Anchorage, 184, 200 Anell, Bengt, 247 animals: domestication of, 93, 95, 97, 100, 103–4, 106, 111; hunting of, 103, 111, 184, 188, 196–7; killing of, 103–7 Aotearoa. See New Zealand A Palavra Viva de Deus (Conceição), 169 Aparecida, Our Lady of, 156–64, 171, 179n2 Apologies to Thucydides (Sahlins, 2004), 25, 27–9, 42 Apotheosis of Captain Cook, The (Obeyesekere, 1992), 21–3, 243 Appadurai, Arjun, 205 Arapasso people, 156 Arawak language, 172 archaeology, 38, 93–4, 100–1, 111–12 Ardrey, Robert, 11 Arens, William, 5 art, 98–101, 261

294 Index

Asad, Talal, 94, 114 Athens, 27, 51, 228 Australia, 14, 119, 238, 241, 243, 254–5 Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, 241 Aztecs, 16, 22 Baker, Thomas, 118 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 205 Bandeira, Alípio, 167 Baniwa language, 157 Baniwa people, 168, 172, 177 Banks, Sir Joseph, 149n4, 253–4 Baptists, 168 Barasana people, 179n7 Barcelos, 162, 169, 171, 176 Barrère, Dorothy, 19 Barthes, Roland, 247 Batavia, 254 Bateson, Gregory, 37, 50 Bau, 26–7, 51, 116 Bayrou, François, 231 Beaglehole, J.C., 242 Beirut, 59 Belém do Pará, 166 Beloff, Max, Baron, 239 Belting, Hans, 101 Benedict, Ruth, 6–7 Berkhofer, Robert F., 247 Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, 14 Best, Elsdon, 248 Bethel, 185 Bilderberg Group, 233 Blair, Tony, 208 Bligh, William (Captain), 127, 133, 253 Bloch, Marc, 247 Boas, Franz, 6–7, 13, 18 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 247 Bororo people, 180n11 Bosco, John, Saint, 180n9 Botany Bay, 255

Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 35, 136, 138, 140–1, 148, 150nn7,11 Bourdieu, Pierre, 18, 20, 110 Bouyeri, Mohammed, 215, 220 Brandeis, Eugen, 82–3 Braudel, Fernand, 18 Braund and Associates, 190 Brazil, 33, 152–81. See also Rio Negro Brewster, A.B., 113–32 British Empire, 114, 131–2n1, 132n2 Brown, George, 70–1, 137 Buck, Peter H., 247 Burrows, Edwin G., 247 Buruma, Ian, 206, 212–13, 216–17, 219 Bush, George W., 234 Butler, Judith, 204 Cagnari, Friar, 166 Cakobau, King of Fiji, 116, 120, 129 Calista Elders Council, 185 cannibalism, 16, 22, 180n17 capitalism, 23–4, 114, 207, 218 Carabixi, 164 Carew, Walter, 123, 129 Carruthers, R.H., 84–5 Caruru, 177 Cassiquiare River, 162 Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de, 28, 172 Çatalhöyük, 38, 95–104, 109 Cauvin, Jacques, 98, 101–2 Certeau, Michel de, 247 Chagnon, Napoleon, 30 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 247 Chambers, William, 84–5 Chanar, Brentina, 186–7, 189–90 Chanar, Cyril, 187–8, 195 Charlie, James, 192–3 Chevalier, Sophie, 6 China, 23, 29, 30 Christian, F.W., 248 Christian, William A., Jr, 162

Index

Christian Democracy (Italy), 231 Christianity: in the Brazilian Amazon, 33, 152–81; counterappropriations of appropriations of, 173–5; in Fiji, 116, 123, 129; function of icons in, 101; and the humiliation model of cultural change, 55–9; in Samoa, 66–7, 75; the “world created full” in, 117–18 Christu, Venancio, 172–3, 177 Christu, Vicente, 172 Cicero, 123 cingssiiget, 186 Clark, Grahame, 93 Clifford, James, 5, 247 Clinton, Bill, 234 cognitive anthropology, 99, 108 Cohn, Bernard, 33, 114, 130, 131–2n1 Cold War, 219 Collingwood, R.G., 247 Colo East, 129 Colombia, 155, 167, 171, 178 colonialism: in Fiji, 123–4, 129; in Hawai‘i, 21; and humiliation model of cultural change, 55; and multiculturalism, 224–5, 227, 232; and the origins of anthropology, 91, 114; Roman and biblical imagery in discourse of, 131–2n1 Columbia University, 7, 9, 165, 238 Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead, 1928), 137 Conceiçao, Bento da, 163, 169–71 Confucius Institutes, 30 conjuncture, structure of the, 16–20, 42–3, 65, 87 Constantine I, Emperor of Rome, 99, 174 Cook, James (Captain): account of expedition, 136, 149n4, 150n7; as exogenous force of change, 26; in popular history, 242–3; portrait by John Webber, 252;

295

Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate over, 4, 21–3, 243; and Sahlins’s theory of theogamy, 135, 150n8; and the structure of the conjuncture, 17, 19–20; and Tupaia, 253–8 Coppet, Daniel de, 135 Coppi, Friar, 166 “Cosmologies of Capitalism” (Sahlins, 1989), 92 cosmopolitanism, 206, 209, 226, 228 Cruz, Erivaldo Almeida, 181n21 Cruz, Jacinto, 179n5 Cubate River, 155, 177 Culler, Jonathan D., 47 cultural anthropology, 15, 24–5, 91–2, 108 culturalism, 182, 198–9 culture: as an adaptive organization, 10, 182; as basis for anthropology, 38; and demography, 232; as epiphenomenon vs autonomous force, 7, 14–15; and ethnicity, 208, 210, 223; and ethnography, 31–2; and globalization, 23–4, 198–200; and human relationships, 241; and the individual, 14, 17, 26, 48–9, 51–4; models of change of, 41–2, 44, 48–56, 60–1; and power, 114; and psychology, 53; replacing class, 222–5; and semiotics, 108; sui generis account of, 16, 22; as underdetermined, 92–3, 100 Culture and Practical Reason (Sahlins, 1976), 14–15, 92, 240 Culture in Practice (Sahlins, 2000), 18 culturology, 7, 13 Cunha, Manuela Carneiro da, 32–4, 36 Danish People’s Party, 222 Davidson, James, 19 Deeb, Lara, 59–60

296 Index

democracy, 87, 90n43, 209, 221, 229, 231 Democratici di sinistra (Italy), 231 Democratic Party (US), 225, 233–4 Dening, Greg, 19, 36, 127 Denmark, 222, 231 Derrida, Jacques, 247 Desana people, 173, 178 Deutsche Handels- und Plantagen Gesellschaft der Südseeinseln zu Hamburg, 81–2 Diamond, Stanley, 7 Dias, Gonçalves, 165 diasporas, 37, 124, 205 Diderot, Denis, 35, 135, 150n7 “Discovery of the True Savage, The” (Sahlins, 1994), 244 “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” (Lévi-Strauss, 1958), 228 dreams, 161–2, 173, 179n7 dualism, diametric vs concentric, 228–9, 235 Dubost, Jean-François, 228 Duff, Roger, 247 Dukumoi, Mosese, 114, 116–17, 126–31 Dumézil, Georges, 241 Dumont, Louis, 3 Düring, Bleda, 98 Durkheim, Émile, 53 Durston, Alan, 173 Easter Island, 10, 15, 150n9, 258 École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 13, 135 economic anthropology, 3 Ecuador, 180n11 Ekholm-Friedman, Kajsa, 229 Elias, Norbert, 253 Ella, Samuel, 70, 73, 75 Emperaire, Laure, 153 English language, 195, 259 Eratosthenes, 255

“Esoteric Efflorescence in Easter Island” (Sahlins, 1955), 238 Espírito Santo, 162, 169 essentialism, 220 ethnography, 32, 204–5, 244 Europe and the People without History (Wolf, 1982), 20 European Union (EU), 236n3 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 247 Evolution and Culture (Sahlins, Service, and Harding, 1960), 12, 238 evolutionism, 8–9, 12, 16–17, 108, 233, 238 “Evolution: Specific and General” (Sahlins, 1960), 12 Fanon, Frantz, 240 Fenua‘enata, 258–9 Fesche, Charles-Félix-Pierre, 138, 141–6, 148 Fienup-Riordan, Ann, 34 Fiji, 113–32; “begging” in, 4; cession to Britain and colonization, 116, 128–9; introduction of firearms to, 26; political leadership in, 70, 115–16; Sahlins’s work on, 9–11, 27, 238 Fiji Civil Service, 120 Fiji Museum, 113 Fiji National Archives, 113, 120 Finley, Moses, 27 Finney, Ben, 258 FOIRN (Federação das Organizações Indígenas do Rio Negro), 175, 181n21 Ford Foundation, 8 formalism, 47 Forster, George, 245 Fortuyn, Pim, 205–7, 211–13, 216, 221, 235 Foucault, Michel, 28, 204, 247 Fox News, 229

Index

France: intellectual debates of the 1960s, 13; political culture in, 222, 225–8, 231, 234; political elite in, 210 Frazer, James George, 241 Freeman, Derek, 134, 137 French Revolution, 221 Fried, Morton, 7 Friedman, Jonathan, 37 Front National, 222 Galvão, Eduardo, 165, 168 Geertz, Clifford, 3, 22, 247 Gell, Alfred, 101 gender: and alcohol abuse, 159; and immigration, 223; and interpretations of sexuality, 134, 151nn20–1; and Islam, 211, 214–15; and political structure, 134; and regional knowledge, 176–7; and traditional education, 191–2 Germany, 65, 80–3, 208, 222, 234 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 41 Giddens, Anthony, 208–9, 232 Gilman, Sander, 121 Gilson, Richard Phillip, 71–2, 75–6, 79, 82 Gitlin, Todd, 225 Gladwin, Thomas, 258 globalization: and cosmopolitanism, 226; and cultural difference, 198– 200; and “despondency theory,” 24; and post-colonial studies, 204; and radical centrism, 209, 232–3; and sovereigntism, 218 Godelier, Maurice, 13 Gogh, Theo van, 205–6, 213, 216, 220–1, 235 Golub, Alex, 135 González, Elián, 27, 51 Gordon, Sir Arthur, 119, 121, 124, 129

297

Graaf, Volkert van der, 212, 215, 220 Graeber, David, 28 Great Britain. See United Kingdom Great Transformation, The (Polanyi, 1957), 8 Green, Kaye, 258 Green, Roger, 258 Grimshaw, Anna, 28 Guadalupe, 170 Guarani people, 172 Gurr, Edwin, 84–5 Gurupá, 165 Gweagal people, 255 Habermas, Jürgen, 15 Haddon, A.C., 247 Handy, E.S. Craighill, 147, 247 Haraway, Donna, 28 Harding, Thomas, 11 Harris, Marvin, 5, 14, 16, 22 Hart, Keith, 28 Harvard University, 239 HAU (journal), 30 Hau‘ofa, Epeli, 4 Hawai‘i: compared with Samoa, 66–7; Obeyesekere’s account of, 22; re-enactment of epic voyages from, 258; Sahlins’s work on, 14, 21, 50, 92, 135, 178–9, 241–2, 244; system of political leadership, 71 head-hunters, 29 Henry, Joe, 185, 202 Henry, Teuira, 134 Heyerdahl, Thor, 245 Hill Tribes of Fiji , The (Joske/ Brewster, 1922), 33, 113–32 Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, 206, 214–15 historical anthropology: and colonialism, 130–1; experimentations with, 19; and post-colonialism, 24; and “real history,” 238–46; Sahlins’s

298 Index

projects of, 21, 114, 241–4; and structuralism, 17, 40–61 Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (Sahlins, 1981), 20, 242 History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 26–7, 51 HM Bark Endeavour, 243, 253–5, 257 HMS Bounty, 127, 252 HMS Dolphin (1751), 252–3 Hobbes, Thomas, 10, 16, 25, 27–8 Hocart, A.M., 241 Hodder, Ian, 93, 95, 97, 110 Holl, Augustin, 98 L’Homme (journal), 13 Hooper, David, 190–1 Hope, Charles (Captain), 67, 76 Hornell, James, 247 Hoskins, Janet, 105 Hough, Richard, 242 How “Natives” Think (Sahlins, 1995), 22, 243–4 Hugh-Jones, Stephen, 179n7 Human Terrain System, 28 humiliation model of cultural change, 55–6 hunter-gatherers, 9, 14 hunting, 103, 111, 188, 196–7 Iarauetê, 155–7, 166–7, 171, 174, 178 Içana River, 155, 167, 172 immigration: in association with Islam, 212; and ethnicization, 208, 210; and failures of selfintegration, 215; Fortuyn’s call for moratorium on, 207; and multiculturalism, 217, 223–4, 227, 231; Van Gogh’s films on, 214 India, 101, 118–19, 123–6 Indigenous peoples: agency, 4; appropriation of foreign

intangibles, 152–81; and cultural continuity, 182; and the English language, 259; and globalization, 200; and historiography, 243– 4; mediated encounters with, 253–4; and modernity, 34, 201, 239; and occidentalism, 218– 20; segregation of children of, 167; and “sentimental pessimism,” 24–5; and settler societies, 248; stage of social evolution, 14; and the structure of the conjuncture, 65; use of hallucinogen, 179n7 Instituto Socioambiental, 175 internationalism, 217–18 Inuit people, 182 Ipanoré Rapids, 153, 155–6 IPHAN (Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional), 155 Iraq, 25–6, 28 ircenrraat, 182–3, 185–90 Irwin, Geoffrey, 258 Islam, 59, 210–15 Islands of History (Sahlins, 1985): and Diderot’s “Supplement,” 35, 135; and microdynamics of a single encounter, 20–1, 242; and Sahlins’s models of cultural change, 26, 50, 62n3; and semiotics, 110; on the specificity of old Hawai‘i, 92; and the structure of the conjuncture, 17 Italy, 231, 234 Jacoby, Eric, 225 John, Jolene, 185, 191 John, Mark, 192–3 John, Martina, 185 John Paul (pope), 185, 192–3, 195, 200

Index

299

Latour, Bruno, 28 Lattimore, Owen, 8 Lays of Ancient Rome (Macaulay, 1842), 127, 130 Lebanon, 59 Le gouvernement invisible: Naissance d’une démocratie sans le peuple (Joffrin, 2001), 210 Les indigènes de la république (France), 227 Kadavu, 127–8 Les Temps Modernes (journal), 13 Kalukaat, 192 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: on cultural Kamakau, Samuel, 20 appropriation, 172; on culture Kame‘eleihiwa, Lilikala, 4, 21 and cultural difference, 14, 45, Kamiko, Uetsu, 172 130; influence, 3, 247; on political Kamiko, Venancio, 172–3, 177 ideology, 235; Sahlins and, 13, Kant, Immanuel, 246 15; on structuralism, 203; theory Kapferer, Bruce, 204 of diametric and concentric Kaplan, Martha, 33, 36 dualisms, 228–9 Karapanã people, 173 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 163 Kassiyuk Dance Festival, 185 Lewis, David, 258 Kealakekua, 242, 254 Lewis-Williams, David, 93 Keane, Webb, 38 liberalism, 216, 219, 226 Kelly, John, 31 King of the Cannibal Isles, The (Joske/ Lima, 173 Lincoln, Billy, 188–9 Brewster, 1937), 113, 118–21 Linnekin, Jocelyn, 6, 21, 32 kingship: in Samoa, 63–90; London Missionary Society (LMS), stranger-, 28–9, 228–9, 241 67, 72, 79 Kingship (Hocart, 1927), 241 Lowie, Robert Harry, 7 kinship, 9–10, 30, 107 Lucian of Samosata, 244 Kipling, Rudyard, 117–19, 123, Lukács, György, 15, 34 126–7 Kirch, Patrick, 4, 21, 178, 242, 258 Luomala, Katherine, 247 Kirchoff, Paul, 8 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 127, Kroeber, Alfred L., 7 130 Kuduí (prophet), 172 Malietoa Laupepa, 63, 76–85 Malietoa Taimalelagi, 73, 75 La faute aux élites (Juilliard, 1997), Malietoa Talavou, 76–80 210 Malietoa Tanumafili, 84–5 language, 45–7, 61n1, 109, 204, Malietoa Vai‘inupō (Tavita), 72–5, 241, 259 Lapérouse, Jean-François de Galaup, 80 comte de, 136–40, 146, 150n10 Malinowski, Bronisław, 15, 238 John XXIII (pope), 170 John Paul II (pope), 170 Jones, Sir William, 130, 131–2n1 Joske, Adolph Brewster, 113–32 Joske, Paul, 120 Journal of Pacific History, 19 Juilliard, Jacques, 223 Jumbo, Thomas, 193

300 Index

Manaus, 155, 171, 175, 177 Manono, 77 Māori language, 151n19 Māori people, 243, 254–5, 257 Marcus, George, 5 Maréchal, Joseph, 247 Margalit, Avishai, 212, 216, 219 Marquesas, 147, 150n9, 256 marriage: in the Amazon, 159, 161, 176; in Polynesia, 133, 135–40, 142–6, 148 Martini, André, 181n21 Marx, Karl, 4, 8, 15, 236, 240 Marxism, 13, 17, 24, 240 Mata‘afa Fagamanu, 76 Mata‘afa Iosefo, 78–81, 83–4 Matavai, 252–3 Maude, Harry, 247 Mauritius, 124 McFate, Montgomery, 5 McGregor, Davianna, 21 Mead, Margaret, 6–7, 134, 137, 147, 151n20 Meggitt, Mervyn, 9 Melanesia, 11 Melbourne, 119–20, 238 Melbourne University, 239 Melkert, Ad, 212 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 130 Merrill, E.D., 247 Meskell, Lynn, 100 Mintz, Sydney, 7 Mithen, Steven J., 102 Moala, 9–10 Moala (Sahlins, 1962), 10, 21, 135, 238 modernism, 208, 216, 221–3 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 7 Morrison, James, 134 Moses, Charlie, 194 Moses, Phillip, 194 Moses, Theresa, 198 Mouvement démocrate (France), 231

Mraz, Jacqueline, 23 Muller, Sophie, 167, 172 Mulligan, James H., 75 multiculturalism: as an elite ideology, 208–9, 211; and colonialism, 226, 232; emergence of, 219; and the left, 217, 223– 5; and liberalism, 216; and occidentalism, 221 Mulvaney, John, 247 Murdock, George, 13 Murphy, Robert, 7 Muslim Brotherhood, 214 myth, 235 Nadarivatu, 118 Nakamura, Carolyn, 100 Nakauvadra Mountain Range, 116 Nanterre University, 13 Nassau-Siegen, Charles Henri Nicolas Otton, prince de, 140–1, 145 National Academy of Sciences, 30 nationalism, 200, 207, 221, 225–7, 233 nation-states, 205, 220–1, 225, 227–8 Navaho sand paintings, 101, 109 Navosavakadua, 114, 116–17, 126–31 Nazaré, 155, 177 Nelson, Edward, 187 Nelson Island, 182–202 neo-conservatism, 229 neo-liberalism, 204, 208, 211, 226 Neolithic period, 98, 103 Netherlands: political culture, 205, 209, 211–15, 218, 226–7, 231; recent history, 207–8 Neue Mitte (Germany), 208, 222 Newell, J.E., 82, 84 New Labour (UK), 208 New Public Management (NPM), 209, 222

Index

301

personhood, 186–90, 195, 197 Piero, della Francesca, 180n19 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 231–2 Pira-Tapuia people, 156, 173, 177 Pius X (pope), 166 Polanyi, Karl, 8, 10 Polynesia: contact with Western powers, 65; as laboratory of cultural evolution, 8; origins of people in, 247, 257–60; political leadership in, 11, 67; sexuality in, 133–51. See also Fiji; Hawai‘i; New Zealand; Samoa; Tahiti Obeyesekere, Gananath, 4, 21–3, Polynesia Company, 120 35, 150n8, 243 “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man, occidentalism, 37, 207, 212, 215– Chief” (Sahlins, 1963), 11–12, 14, 21, 226 Occidentalism (Buruma and Margalit, 240 Portugal, 180n12 2004), 216, 219 Occupy Wall Street movement, 234 Portuguese language, 153, 157, 167, 177, 180n12 Oliver, Doug, 247 post-colonialism, 21–2, 24–5, 204, Ong, Walter J., 249 Oraison, Henri de Fulque d’, 140–1 220, 225 postmodernism, 23, 25, 34, 246 orientalism, 219–20 post-structuralism, 24 “Original Affluent Society, The” (Sahlins, 1968), 13–14, 91–2, 152 power functionalism, 61 practice theory, 4, 23 Orinoco River, 173 Prickly Paradigm Press, 28 orixá worship, 181n22 primatology, 9 Ortner, Sherry, 4, 18, 20, 23 Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Ottoman Empire, 221 Economies (Polanyi, 1968), 8 “Our Sea of Islands” (Hau‘ofa, Pritchard, William T., 140 1993), 4 Prodi, Romano, 231 Protestantism, 160, 167–8, 178, 207 Pacific History Association, 241 psychoanalysis, 18 Papua New Guinea, 11, 24, 56 Puck of Pook’s Hill (Kipling, 1906), Pará, 158–9, 165 118 Paraíba River, 179n2 Pulepule, 79 Parkinson, Sydney, 254 Purea, 252–3 Partito Democratico (Italy), 231 Pea Tavini, 80 Qalulleq River, 194 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 95, 109 Qasginguaq, 184, 187, 190–5, Pentecostalism, 167 199–200 performance art, 260–1 qasgit, 191–2 Pernambuco, 165 New Zealand: anthropology in, 243, 256–7; early encounters in, 150n9; Kipling on, 118; in re-enacted voyages, 258–9; Tupaia’s visit to, 254–5, 257 Nheengatu lingua franca, 157, 177, 180n12 Nightmute, 184, 190–1, 193–7 non-human persons, 186–90, 195, 197 Nunakauyak Traditional Council, 190, 199

302 Index

Qing Empire, 23 Querari, 155, 178 qununit, 186 Race, Language, and Culture (Boas, 1982), 18 racism, 210–14, 218, 223–4, 227 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 15 radicalism, 209 Rahner, Karl, 247 Ra‘iātea, 249, 252, 254, 258 Rapa Nui, 10, 15, 150n9, 258 Rarotonga, 67 Redfield, James, 27 Reginaldo, 155–7, 159, 171, 176, 178 religion: archaeological artifacts as evidence of, 96, 98–103; and occidentalism, 220, 223; orixáworship, 181n22; and political ideology, 235; as principle of constituted realities, 94; and structuralism, 108. See also Christianity; Islam; ritual; Roman Catholicism Republican Party (US), 229, 233–4 Rewa, 26–7, 51, 116 Rewards and Fairies (Kipling, 1910), 118 Ricoeur, Paul, 204 Rio Negro: appropriation of religious symbols in, 178; Carmelite order in, 158–9, 164– 5; course, 155; in extractive economy, 180n8; Indigenous people of the Middle, 161; Indigenous people of the Upper, 157, 161, 168, 171, 179n7; map, 154; Salesian order in, 167 ritual: and ambivalence, 229; and art, 99; and group status, 57–8; and materiality, 104; missionaries’

attitudes to, 167, 175, 178; organizational basis, 165, 181n22; and taboo, 146; vs catharsis, 259. See also religion Robbins, Joel, 38–9 Roman Catholicism: Carmelites, 164–5; Franciscans, 165–6; Indigenous appropriations of, 33, 153–81; Jesuits, 153, 157, 165, 172, 177, 180n12; lay brotherhoods, 165–6, 168; official vs popular, 175–6; in Samoa, 79; Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), 156, 170, 178. See also Salesian order Roman Empire, 131–2n1 Rorty, Richard, 247 Rotterdam, 213 Rotuma, 127–8 Royal Anthropological Institute, 124 Rubin, Gayle, 4 Rudall, Nicholas, 27 Ryan, Michael, 117 Sahlins, Marshall: career, 9–16; debates with other scholars, 4–5, 21–3, 35, 150n8, 243; education, 6–9; and historical anthropology, 40–4, 61, 110– 11, 113–14, 236, 243–4; on Indigenous peoples and indigenization, 152, 200; influence, 3–6, 91–3, 152, 178– 9, 204, 238, 240; “method of uncontrolled comparison,” 205; models of cultural change, 50–6, 62n3, 182; political activism, 12, 30; on “powerism,” 61; on religion, 94, 175; theory of theogamy, 135, 149, 150n8; theory of the structure of the conjuncture, 16–20, 42–3, 65,

Index

87; understanding of culture, 61, 92, 99, 117, 131, 182, 198–9, 241–2; work on political culture, 235; work on the “stranger-king,” 28–9, 228, 241. See also individual publications Sahlins, Peter, 228 Said, Edward, 5 Salamasina, 71 Salesian order: in Ecuador, 180n11; founding, 180n9; in Iauaretê, 156; possession of Indigenous artifacts, 175; resistance against appropriation of Catholicism, 174; and Rio Negro Province, 166–8, 179n7; selection and instruction of catechists, 169 Salmond, Anne, 150n6 Samoa: kingship in, 32, 63–90; in re-enacted voyages, 258–9; sexuality in, 134–5, 137–40, 147– 8; terms for young, unmarried woman, 151n19 Samoa Times, 74, 78, 80 Santa Catarina (state), 169 Santa Isabel, 153, 155, 157, 168, 171, 176–7 São Gabriel da Cachoeira, 153, 157, 169, 177 São Paulo, 178 Sapir, Edward, 6 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 17, 34–5 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 45–7, 61n1, 241 Savage, Charley, 26 Savai‘i, 69, 77 Scammon Bay, 196 Scandinavia, 222 schismogenesis, 37, 50–1, 55, 211 science, 18, 34–5, 95, 203, 236, 255 Scientific American (journal), 11, 15 Scotland, 119, 122

303

Search for a Method (Sartre, 1963), 17, 34 Seligman, Charles Gabriel, 137 semiotics, 107–12 September 11th attacks, 25–6, 210, 212 Sewell, William H., Jr, 42, 48–9, 53, 62n2 sexuality, 133–51, 207, 211, 216, 221 Sharp, Andrew, 245, 256–8 Shuar people, 180n11 slavery, 228 Smith, Bernard, 247 Smith, Percy, 248 Snow, Philip, 120 social anthropology, 92, 99 Social Stratification in Polynesia (Sahlins, 1958), 8–9, 12, 238 Solf, Wilhelm, 85 Somalia, 214 sovereigntism, 211, 218–19, 221, 231 Soviet Union, 219 Sparta, 51, 228 SPI (Serviço de Proteção aos Indios), 167 Stair, John, 73 “Spirit of the Gift, The” (Sahlins, 1968), 13 Stanford University, 220 Steinberger, A.B., 79–80 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 89n10, 90n36 Steward, Julian, 7–8, 10 Stone Age Economics (Sahlins, 1972), 3, 13, 240 structuralism: and the assassinations of Fortuyn and Van Gogh, 221, 235–6; and free will, 205–6; and Marxism, 13; and materialist semiotics, 108; and the notion

304 Index

Trask, Haunani-Kay, 20 Tribesmen (Sahlins, 1968), 19, 24, 36 Trilateral Commission, 233 Trinidad, 124 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1958), 45 Tuimaleali‘ifano Sualauvi, 77 Tuinaceva, Setariki, 120, 127 Tuka movement, 116, 118, 126–7, 130 Tukano language, 157, 172 Tukano people, 156, 177 Tulik, Camilius, 192–4, 197, 200 Tahiti: in re-enacted voyages, Tundra Drums (newspaper), 185 258; religion in, 249, 252, 255; Tunuí, 177 sexuality in, 135–8, 140–6, 149; Tununak, 184, 192, 195 Tupaia’s depictions of, 254 Tupaia, 249–58 Tapereira, 158, 163 Taputapuātea, 249, 252, 254, 258–60 Tupi language, 157 Tupi people, 172 Taracuá, 156 Tupua Tamasese, 79, 81–3, 85 Tariano people, 155–6, 166, 173, Turi River, 173 178 Turner, Peter, 66–7, 77, 137 Tawney, R.H., 247 Turner, Victor, 247 Taylor, Charles, 22 Tuyuka people, 173, 177–8 Taylor, Meadows, 124–5 Tylor, Edward, 238 Tcherkézoff, Serge, 35–6 Tea Party (US), 234 Uaupés River, 155–6, 165–6, 178 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 247 Ulurruk, 193 theogamy, 134–5, 149, 150n8 Umkumiut, 185, 192 Third Way, 208, 222, 230 UNESCO, 179n4 Thomas, Saint (apostle), 153 United Kingdom: anthropology in, Thomas, Nicholas, 4 238, 243; Kipling on history of, Thompson, Bobby, 27 118; and notions of “kingship,” Thompson, E.P., 247 241; political culture, 208, 222, Thucydides, 5, 27 226; and Samoa, 65, 75–6; and Thurston, Sir John Bates, 122 Tahiti, 252–3 Tilly, Charles, 37 United States: anthropology in, Tim, David, 192 238, 243; Civil War, 120; Elián Toksook Bay, 184, 190, 195–6 González case, 27, 51, 54; foreign Toksook Bay Tribal Council, 192 policy, 87; invasion of Afghanistan, Tonga, 66–7, 70, 115, 150n9, 259 25, 28; invasion of Iraq, 25, 28; Trade and Market in the Early Empire missionaries from, 167; political (Polanyi, 1957), 8 culture in, 225, 229, 233, 234; “Traffic in Women, The” (Rubin, protests against Vietnam War, 12, 1975), 4 of synchrony, 44–5; and realism, 203–4; Sahlins and, 15, 17, 29, 42 Submission (film), 214 substantivism, 10 Sumba, 100, 104–6 Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage Around the World (Diderot, 1796), 135 Suva, 120 Sweden, 208–10, 222, 224–8 Swedish Democrats, 222

Index

28; and Samoa, 65, 75–6; in Theo van Gogh’s film, 213 Upolu, 69, 76 Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, 13 University of Chicago, 9, 14 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 6, 9 Urapmin people, 56–9 Urubuquara, 156 Use and Abuse of Biology, The (Sahlins, 1976), 16 US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), 196, 202 Usugan, Frances, 187–9, 192 Uttereyuk, Mike, Sr, 196 Valeri, Valerio, 106 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 180n15 Vatukaloko people, 128, 129 Vaujuas, François René Charles Treton de, 146 Vayda, Andrew, 11 Venezuela, 167, 171 Veríssimo, José, 165–6 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 27 Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 63, 81–2 Vietnam War, 12, 28 Villiers, Alan, 242 Viti Levu, 113–16 Vollen, Barbara, 238 Wagley, Charles, 165 Waiting for Foucault, Still (Sahlins, 2002), 34 Walbiri drawings, 101 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 165–6 Wallis, Samuel (Captain), 252–3

305

Wanano people, 156, 178 Waters, J.H., 122 Watkins, Trevor, 102 Webber, John, 150n10, 252 Weber, Max, 37 welfare states, 207–9, 229, 231 West Africa, 181n20 Western Illusion of Human Nature, The (Sahlins, 2008), 10 Westin, Charles, 224 What Kinship Is – And Is Not (Sahlins, 2013), 30 White, Hayden, 247 White, Leslie: “culturology,” 7, 13; debunking of American beliefs, 10; determinism, 17, 38; evolutionism, 12; and Franz Boas, 7; and Marshall Sahlins, 6, 8–9; on religion, 94 White, Richard, 247 Whitehouse, Harvey, 99 Wilkes, Charles, 72 Williams, John, 72–3, 75, 149n4 Williamson, Arthur, 131n1 Williamson, Robert Wood, 137 Wittfogel, Karl, 8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 110, 247 Wolf, Eric, 3–4, 7, 9, 20, 114 World Economic Forum, 233 Wretched of the Earth (Fanon, 1965), 240 Wright, Robin, 180n16 xenophobia, 210, 218, 225, 228 Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, 196 Yup’ik language, 184, 191, 195 Yup’ik people, 184–202

a p r ac t ic e o f an th ropology

Marshall Sahlins at Manny’s Cafeteria and Delicatessen, Chicago, 2007. Photograph by Alan Thomas.

A Practice Of Anthropology The Thought and Influence of Marshall Sahlins

E d it ed By

Al e x Gol ub Dani e l Rosenblatt John D. Kelly

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2016 isbn isbn isbn isbn

978-0-7735-4688-2 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4689-9 (paper) 978-0-7735-9862-1 (ePDF) 978-0-7735-9863-8 (ePUB)

Legal deposit second quarter 2016 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication   A practice of anthropology : the thought and influence of Marshall Sahlins / edited by Alex Golub, Daniel Rosenblatt, John D. Kelly. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4688-2 (cloth). -- ISBN 978-0-7735-4689-9 (paperback).-ISBN 978-0-7735-9862-1 (ePDF). -- ISBN 978-0-7735-9863-8 (ePUB)   1. Sahlins, Marshall, 1930–. 2. Ethnology. 3. Social change. I. Rosenblatt, Daniel, editor II. Kelly, John D., editor III. Golub, Alex, editor IV. Sahlins, Marshall, 1930–, honouree GN320.P73 2016  306  C2016-900711-1 C2016-900712-X Typeset by New Leaf Publication Design in 10.5/13 Baskerville

Contents

Table and Figures  vii Preface Claude Lévi-Strauss ix Introduction: A Practice of Anthropology – The Work of Marshall Sahlins, So Far Alex Golub, Daniel Rosenblatt, and John D. Kelly  3 1 How Long Is a Longue Durée? Structure, Duration, and the Cultural Analysis of Cultural Change Joel Robbins 40 2 Monarchical Visions: Constructions of “Kingship” in Colonial Samoa Jocelyn Linnekin 63 3 Slow Time: Culture, Materiality, and the Knowability of the Neolithic Webb Keane 91 4 From Jew to Roman: Mr Joske, Mr Brewster, The Hill Tribes of Fiji, and the Hill Tribes of Fiji Martha Kaplan  113 5 Supplement to Marshall Sahlins’s Voyage Around the Islands of History (Tahiti 1768, Samoa 1787) Serge Tcherkézoff 133

vi Contents

6 Chassé-croisé: Or How Christianity Appropriated Indigenous Appropriation of Christianity on the Rio Negro Manuela Carneiro da Cunha  152 7 The Past Is Old, the Future Is Traditional: Ircenrraat, the DOT , and the Inventiveness of Tradition Ann Fienup-Riordan 182 8 The Kafka Connection: Structure, Lifeworld, and the Cunning of History Jonathan Friedman 203 9 Way-Finding: Respectfulness as a Performance Art Greg Dening 237 Bibliography  263 Contributors  291 Index 293

Tables and Figures

Tables

8.1 The shifting content of progressive ideology  217

Figures



2.1 Laupepa’s letter to Queen Victoria  64 2.2 Mata‘ata Iosefo  78 6.1 The Upper and Middle Rio Negro basin. Source : Instituto Socioambiental, 2008  154 7.1 Nelson Island place names. Drawn by Michael Knapp 183 7.2 Qasginguaq, June 2009. Photo by Ann Fienup-Riordan 184 8.1 External meets internal occidentalism  218 8.2 Components of the concentric shift in political culture 230 8.3 Diametric to concentric dualism  230 9.1a Tupaia’s chart. Drawn by Emily Brissenden, after 1.133, p. 130, in The Charts and Coastal Views of Captain Cook’s Voyages, vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768– 1771, ed. Andrew David (London: Hakluyt Society, 1988) 250 9.1b Identifiable islands on Tupaia’s chart. Drawn by Emily Brissenden 251

Preface Claude Lévi-Strauss Translated by Marie Salaun

It is with great pleasure that I seize the opportunity to express my admiration and reiterate my old and faithful friendship to Marshall Sahlins. World-renowned as a master in Polynesian studies, Sahlins is also the object of a special gratefulness among his French colleagues. For many years, frequent visits to France have allowed him to become one of the best experts on their work. He has been a link between French and North American academics. He has helped them to mutually better understand each other. To illustrate Marshall Sahlins’s gift for synthesis, we shall remember how his reinterpretation of Polynesian historical facts has allowed him to overcome the often-misleading dichotomy between structure and event. Today’s anthropology is often tempted by postmodernism, constructivism, etc. In his writings as well as in his lectures, Sahlins has always known how to put anthropology back on the right track. He now stands as a sage among anthropologists, maybe the last one, which gives even more value to his recommendations.

Introduction: The Work of Marshall Sahlins, So Far

Introduction A Practice of Anthropology – The Work of Marshall Sahlins, So Far Alex Golub, Daniel Rosenblatt, and John D. Kelly It is time to add Marshall Sahlins to the short list of great anthropologists, time to celebrate his contributions to the discipline, and time to discuss the far-reaching impact of his works. Sahlins has proved a more difficult (and diffident) subject for celebratory synthesis than many of his peers. The works of Eric Wolf (Abbink and Vermeulen 1992), Louis Dumont (Heesterman 1985), and others have received the attention they deserve, and the paeans for Clifford Geertz began even before his unfortunate passing in 2006 (Ortner 1999, Shweder and Good 2005). The most important anthropologist of the period after the Second World War, Claude Lévi-Strauss, was the subject of intense scholarly discussion for decades before his centenary in 2008. Yet the way in which discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s early works has drawn attention away from his later ones may have contributed to Sahlins’s oft-expressed reluctance to be memorialized before he was finished having his say. And so in this volume we come to praise – but not to bury – one of the major anthropologists of the post-war period, Marshall Sahlins. What are Sahlins’s contributions to anthropology? It is a harder question to answer than may at first appear. His 1972 book Stone Age Economics established much of the basic framework of contemporary economic anthropology, but when hundreds of scholars gathered at the American Anthropological Association meetings in 1997 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the volume, Sahlins quipped

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that they were still “stuck in the stone age.” In her famous article on theory in anthropology since the 1960s, Sherry Ortner (1984) cites Sahlins as one of the founders of “practice theory,” while also admitting that if she had centred her article on the emergence of “history” as a key term in anthropology rather than “practice,” Sahlins would still have been a central figure in her narrative. Economics, history, practice, evolution – Sahlins somehow seems to be at the centre of all of these. Beyond his well-known theoretical innovations, Sahlins has also had a quieter but no-less important influence on thinkers from many areas. In the acknowledgments to her article “The Traffic in Women,” pioneering feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin thanks Marshall Sahlins for “the revelation of anthropology” (1975: 157). In the Pacific, Sahlins’s writings have had an even wider influence: In the 1992 book Anahulu he brought two of the four subfields of anthropology together by collaborating with archaeologist Patrick Kirch to produce a joint history of the Anahulu river valley. In his groundbreaking text “Our Sea of Islands,” anthropologist and novelist Epeli Hau‘ofa credits Sahlins for “convincing me in the end that not all is lost and that the world of Oceania is quite bright despite appearances” (1993: 16). The great Hawaiian scholar Lilikala Kame‘eleihiwa wrote that she owed “a great debt to Marshall Sahlins for his intellectual inspiration and great kindness. An academic of the first order, he is excited by Hawaiians writing about their own history and in my bleakest hours gave me hope. I would never have thought of a doctorate had he not considered my work valuable” (1986: iii) – although she later decided she was “disappointed in Sahlins’s work, because I had mistakenly supposed him to be one of the few foreign academics who had aloha for us,” but he was really one of a “long line of foreign denigrators of Hawaiian society” (1995: 16). Kame‘eleihiwa is far from unique in finding much in Sahlins to disagree with. Indeed, the range and importance of Sahlins’s activities are reflected in the numerous controversies, disputes, and critical engagements in which he has been involved. Sahlins has argued famously with Gananath Obeyesekere over the death of James Cook; with Eric Wolf on the role of Indigenous agency in shaping colonial history; with Nicholas Thomas on the history and theoretical significance of Fijian “begging”; with Marx and other political economists on the determining power of “needs” in structuring social



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life; with socio-biologists on the role of biology in society; with Marvin Harris on the relationship between nutrition and culture; with Thucydides on the role of great men and rational interests in history; with William Arens on the existence of cannibalism; with Montgomery McFate on the appropriateness of anthropological participation in the Iraq War; with Edward Said, George Marcus, and James Clifford on the relationship between representation and power; and with any number of recent anthropologists on whether things like globalization and the emergence of transnational communities should mean the end of “culture” as a central theoretical term and preoccupation for anthropologists. Influential, yes; but certainly controversial as well. One might start trying to understand Sahlins’s thought by turning to that of his students. However, here again one would be disappointed. Despite (or because) having something to say on so many things, Sahlins has not founded a school or a movement. Those who have studied with him know that he considers imitation to be the opposite of flattery – he has too much respect for the particular to insist that his students be subsumed under him. Nevertheless, many of us, including (but hardly limited to) the editors and contributors to this book, have been profoundly influenced by his work. Since he continues to publish today, we expect that influence to continue to take new forms. Even so, we are happy to celebrate and reflect on his work thus far by bringing together these essays. An influential scholar with no organized school, an intellectual who has been both deeply oppositional to some paradigms and foundational in others – it is difficult to grasp the totality of Marshall Sahlins’s impact and the underlying connections of his important, powerful, and varied arguments. In order to do so, this introduction begins to synthesize Sahlins’s work by tracing some of his transformations across time and space. While we have no pretensions to venturing serious intellectual biography, we do hope to provide an account that contextualizes the chapters in this volume, and that will provide a coherent description of an author who has been cited, analyzed, attacked, addressed, lauded, contested, and defended, but rarely simply described. One common summation of Marshall Sahlins’s work is that “in the course of his intellectual career Sahlins has made a transition from materialism to idealism” (Linnekin 1987: 669). “Theoretical adversaries perceive Sahlins as a talented but mercurial-thinker,” wrote

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Linnekin, while “supporters counter that, unlike most scholars, Sahlins is not afraid to change his mind” (ibid.). We, on the other hand, will follow Chevalier in arguing that Sahlins’s thought has shown “extraordinary consistency over a long period” (2005). In what follows we hope to show that Sahlins’s shifts of position are due to his attempt to clarify the meaning and implications of the culture concept. Not a dogmatic structure, then, but a certain practice of anthropology can be discerned in Sahlins’s writings. Humanistic, logically rigorous, richly empirical, and generalizing, Sahlins’s practice of anthropology represents a vision of our discipline whose lessons could greatly benefit anthropology today. Such, at any rate, is our argument. In what follows we begin with a biographical overview of Sahlins’s thought before turning to the essays in this volume and demonstrating how they speak to themes in Sahlins’s thought, and to each other.

Biographical Overview of Marshall Sahlins’s Thought Early Years – From Chicago to Michigan to New York: 1930–1953 Marshall Sahlins grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in a middle-class neighbourhood on the west side of Chicago, the son of RussianJewish immigrants.1 Too young to participate in the Second World War, he attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he became a student and protegé of Leslie White. White was “one of those maverick intellectuals and politicians, like Thorstein Veblen, Charles Beard and Robert La Follette, who came out of the rural American heartland to off the pieties-and powers-that-be” (Sahlins 2008b). The power-that-was in anthropology during White’s early career was Franz Boas, who reinvented American anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century. White was a student of Edward Sapir, but hardly considered himself a Boasian. Boas favoured the close study of individual cases, something he inherited from the bourgeois German Romantic tradition (Bunzl 1996), while White was an Anglo-Protestant who sought to build a general science of social evolution. Of course, White had WASP contemporaries such as Mead and Benedict who were also interested in moving beyond particularism, but they came from



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affluent East Coast backgrounds. White, in contrast, grew up on the farm and was committed to a populist radical socialism. Mead and Benedict saw their work as building on Boas’s legacy, while White saw his recuperating a tradition that started with Lewis Henry Morgan. Sometimes things got personal: White referred to Boas’s prose style as “corny” in no less a venue than the American Journal of Sociology (1947: 372), while Lowie (1960) referred to White’s work as “a farrago of immature metaphysical notions” (411), shaped by “the obsessive power of fanaticism [which] unconsciously warps one’s vision” (413). As White’s student, then, Sahlins learned about Boasian anthropology in order to repudiate it. In its place, White built a generalizing science of “culturology,” which according to Sahlins, “somehow accommodated the irreconcilable combination of a positivist materialism and a foundationalist symbolism” (Sahlins 2000c: 11). Early on, then, Sahlins was introduced to a problematic that would shape his thinking: how could culture be both an epiphenomenon of deeper economic structure and an autonomous force that determined social life and profoundly shaped human action? It was a question he would spend much of his career attempting to answer. Sahlins received a bachelor of arts degree and a master of arts degree in anthropology at Michigan under White, and in 1952 he went to Columbia to study for a doctorate. Although Boas founded the Department of Anthropology there, by 1952 Boasians such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead had been marginalized by the university’s administration and a series of imported department chairs. The most important for our purposes here was Julian Steward, who chaired the department from 1946 to 1952 (Manners 1996: 329). A student of Kroeber and Lowie, Steward combined natural history with Boasian anthropology to study how culture adapted to the environment. Although he had departed for the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign by the time Sahlins arrived at Columbia, Steward left behind him a large cohort of students including Eric Wolf, Sydney Mintz, Robert Murphy, Stanley Diamond, and Morton Fried. Many of these men were later hired into the department. Sahlins found an environment at Columbia, then, that shared strong affinities with White’s culturology. Fried served as the chair of Sahlins’s dissertation committee. While there was diversity within this group, there were important similarities, as well. They were “all some shade of red” (Wolf in Friedman 1987: 109) and read

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Steward’s cultural ecology – influenced more by the work of field naturalists and geologists than Marx – through a leftist lens. They also read leftists such as Owen Lattimore and Karl Wittfogel (by then a reactionary right-winger), whose materialist and generalizing approaches extended Marxism to the study of Asian and Middle Eastern societies. Comparative and intellectually adventuresome, their leftist approach dealt with the nitty-gritty of political economy. A second major influence on Marshall Sahlins at Columbia was the historian Karl Polanyi (Harvey et al. 2007, Congdon 1991, Levitt 2006). Born in 1886, Polanyi was a member of Hungary’s bourgeoisie whose generation sought spiritual renewal and intellectual revival in the face of a stifling national culture of Christian patriotism. He fled Hungary after the communist revolution there in 1919, eventually ending up in North America where he wrote his masterpiece, The Great Transformation (1957). This book demonstrated that the emergence of market-based societies in modern Europe was historically contingent and not inevitable. In 1952 Polanyi used Ford Foundation money to create a seminar on economic history that eventually resulted in the collected volume Trade and Market in the Early Empire (1957). The seminar examined the historical origins of the market by examining trade across time and space, and Polanyi’s critique of the “market mentality” (best seen in Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies, a collection of his essays published in 1968) would provide much of the intellectual foundation of Sahlins’s later critique of political economy in both its Smithian and Marxian forms. Sahlins’s 1954 dissertation, Social Stratification in Polynesia (published in 1958), synthesized White’s evolutionary theory, Steward’s cultural ecology, and Polanyi’s substantivist economics. He argued that Polynesia provided a natural laboratory to test theories of cultural evolution because the culture of Polynesian voyagers was an independent variable while the environment on which they settled varied from island to island. Sahlins concluded that “social structure was functionally adjusted to the technological exploitation of the environment” (1958: ix). Taking his lead from a popular (but at the time unpublished) article by Paul Kirchoff (1955), Sahlins argued that the “conical clans” Kirchoff described – which appeared in Polynesia in the form of chiefly lineages – were a transitional stage between egalitarian societies and more stratified ones. With the publication of his dissertation, Marshall Sahlins established himself as a figure in the new, generalizing approaches to evolution, economics, and politics that were rapidly becoming central to the discipline.



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Social Stratification has several features that became characteristically Sahlins: It was focused on the Pacific, which he would study for the rest of his career. Topically, it was focused on kinship and politics – or, rather, the point at which one turned into the other – and their relationship to economics. This was also the first of the many comparative studies that Sahlins would make over the years. Economics and Evolution: 1953–1969 Like the work of many students in the 1950s, Sahlins’s dissertation was based on library research. Shortly after defending Social Stratification, he undertook his first field-based project: a study of “culture and nature” on the island of Moala in Fiji, which was the beginning a lifelong connection with that country. On his return to the United States from Fiji in 1956 he was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan and served there in Leslie White’s department, where he remained until 1972 when he moved to the University of Chicago. In the lates 1960s, Sahlins spent two crucial years in Paris. This was the period in which Sahlins’s early thought matured. Michigan was flourishing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The university had handled the post-war influx of students and money much more successfully than had Columbia (Hollinger 1998), and retirements and growth had led to the hiring of young and ambitious professors such as Mervyn Meggitt and Eric Wolf. Evolution was growing in popularity nationally. Leslie White, once a voice crying in the wilderness, was even elected to the presidency of the American Anthropological Association in 1964. Evolution and adaptation had become mainstream. Marshall Sahlins quickly became central to much of this work, publishing on a wide variety of topics, including primate behaviour – in “Social Life of Monkeys, Apes, and Primitive Man” (1959). As a four-field anthropologist interested in evolution, it makes sense that Sahlins would attempt to resolve “the problem of distinguishing humanity from other primates” (Sahlins 2009a). Much as he had synthesized the literature on Polynesia, Sahlins now worked through the literature on primate behaviour and hunter-gatherers. In “The Origin of Society” (1960c) he argued that “comparison of primate sociology with the findings of anthropological research immediately suggests a startling conclusion: The way people act, and probably have always acted, is not the expression of inherent human nature … Human social life is culturally, not biologically,

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determined” (77). Culturally, not biologically determined: Here we see clearly Sahlins’s indebtedness to Polanyi and White and their debunking of American beliefs in the naturalness of individualism and the market. Here we see clearly that the theme of the cultural determination of behaviour runs through Sahlins’s career in both his “materialist” and “idealist” phases. The question at issue was what causes culture itself. This article also sees Sahlins arguing that Hobbes’s “famous fantasy of a war of ‘all against all’ in the natural state could not be further from the truth” (1960c: 82). Rather, he argued that it is non-human primates who could be said to exhibit Hobbes’s war of all against all. Human behaviour, in contrast, is organized by culture. It was the beginning of an opposition to Hobbes that would characterize Sahlins’s career. Indeed, this is the same critique of Hobbes that we find in The Western Illusion of Human Nature (2008d), a half-century later. Better known from this period is Sahlins’s work on “substantivism”: the idea, originating from Polanyi, that economic processes are embedded in kinship and political systems. Although he did produce a few papers in the Whitean mode explaining the ecological origins of cultural practices such as Easter Island moai, in “Esoteric Efflorescence in Easter Island” (1955), and the segmentary lineage system (Sahlins 1961), the bulk of Sahlins’s work in this period argued for the irrevocably cultural nature of the structure of kinship systems and distributive mechanisms. His focus at this time was thus not the adaptation of culture to the environment, but rather the variety of mechanisms through which harmony, rather than a Hobbesian war of all against all, came to be characteristic of human social life. This can be seen clearly in Moala (1962a), the ethnography that came out of Sahlins’s Fijian fieldwork. Moala, along with Anahulu (co-authored with Patrick Kirch), are the longest pieces that Sahlins has written. Moreover, Moala is the only ethnography based on “traditional” immersive long-term fieldwork – at least to date. Sahlins uses Steward’s concept of “levels of sociocultural integration” to organize his discussion of life on the island of Moala from the household level to Moala’s articulation with Fiji as a whole. While the volume is (as its dust jacket says) “frankly evolutionary,” its focus is on kinship and social structure – particularly the kindred. Culture is seen as an “adaptive organization,” but the articulation between



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culture and the environment is not the main topic of Moala. Unlike the work done by ecological anthropologists such as his classmate Andrew Vayda, Sahlins spends little time dealing with the flora and fauna of the island, energetics, or agricultural production. Rather, Moala’s key innovation is a refusal to “compartmentaliz[e] the ethnographic data under the usual categorical rubrics: ‘technology,’ ‘economics,’ ‘kinship,’ ‘political organization,’ ‘law,’ ‘ritual,’ and so forth” (1962a: 4). Instead the goal is to see what these things look like when they are not “disembedded” (Polanyi’s term) from the kinship system as they are in “civilized” societies. We should not, then, overemphasize the evolutionary and adaptive dimensions of Sahlins’s early work. Despite being written in his most “evolutionary” moment, Sahlins’s Fijian ethnography is more concerned with what happens to food once it gets into a culture system rather than with how it got there. Indeed, much of his work during this period focused on kinship, for example, his “Remarks on Social Structure in Southeast Asia” (1963a). Fiji sits right on the divide between the culture areas of Polynesia and Melanesia, and it may be that this fact, as well as the work of Sahlins’s colleague Thomas Harding in Papua New Guinea, led Sahlins to publish one of his best-known articles, “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief” (1963b). Here Sahlins again summarizes the literature on political organization in Polynesia and Melanesia in order to derive two ideal types of political leadership – the Melanesian “big-man” and the Polynesian “chief.” It is typically encyclopedic and synthetic work, but it marked a shift in Sahlins’s authorial voice: humorous, polemic, practical, and elegant. This shift to a stillrigorous but more artfully written style can also be seen in his book reviews for Scientific American, especially that of Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis (1962b), and still more adventurous is “African Nemesis: An Off-Broadway Review,” (1964a) written in the form of a play. Stylistically, Sahlins was coming into his own. For someone building a natural science of society, “Poor Man, Rich Man” seemed remarkably willing to eschew scientism. In that piece, Sahlins famously employed a method of “uncontrolled comparison” – “reading the monographs and taking notes” (1963b: 285) – very different from that of the lab scientist. The scope of vision and ease of reading made Sahlins’s article one of the most influential in Pacific anthropology, eliciting dozens of papers and books that played off his title. In retrospect, Sahlins’s distinction

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between the Melanesian big-man and Polynesian chief has not withstood scholarly scrutiny (for a good overview, see Roscoe 2000), but Sahlins’s willingness to generalize moved the field forward – indeed, it is a sign of his influence that his findings spurred the creation of a body of work rigorous enough to question his conclusions. In this period Sahlins also cemented his reputation as a theorist of cultural evolution. Social Stratification’s reconciliation of White and Steward was incomplete. White’s evolutionism was rooted in Victorian notions of improvement and progress, while Steward’s was aligned to the evolutionary synthesis in contemporary biology, focused as it was on non-teleological adaptation to particular environments (Smocovitis 2012). How to reconcile Whitean evolutionas-progress with Steward’s evolution-as-adaptation? These were the issues that Sahlins approached in his essay “Evolution: Specific and General” (1960a) in the small, influential volume Evolution and Culture (Sahlins, Service, and Harding 1960) which exemplified the Michigan approach to evolution. Here, Sahlins argued that societies could be understood in terms of either their adaptation to a specific environment or the general level of complexity they had achieved. Additionally, Sahlins emphasized that all of these processes are historical, and none imply that “primitive” people lack moral worth. With this reconciliation, Sahlins laid claim to a leading role in the shaping of the new evolutionary anthropology. During his years in Michigan, Sahlins was also on the forefront of politics, another of his hallmarks. With Eric Wolf and others, Sahlins organized – indeed, invented – the “teach-in” as a method of protest against the Vietnam War. He wrote actively against academic collaboration with the military, and even visited Vietnam to write about the atrocities committed there (1966a, 1966c). These efforts reflected a deep commitment to morality and activism, which Sahlins maintains to this day. The peace movement also affected his thinking about social life. White’s insistence that human behaviour is culturally determined seemed increasingly far-fetched during this time of rapid social change. The question of human agency and its relation to social structure was quietly added to Sahlins’s intellectual project, to become increasingly central to his writings as time went on. By the mid-1960s, however, Sahlins was getting tired of Michigan. Developing intellectually was difficult while serving under his mentor White, the anti-war movement was becoming simultaneously radicalized and infiltrated by the FBI, and Sahlins increasingly felt he was doing more organizing and less anthropology. In 1966 he



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attended a conference on kinship organized by Maurice Godelier and George Murdock at Lévi-Strauss’s laboratoire in Paris and was well received. An invitation to visit France for a year soon followed and Sahlins accepted. Culture as a Sui Generis Force: 1969–1976 Sahlins liked France and his initial one-year appointment at the famous sixth section of the École des Hautes Études was extended; he spent an additional year as a faculty member at Nanterre. This time abroad gave Sahlins time to develop, especially as a prose stylist. More and more in his work, he would adopt abrupt changes of register, shifting from big-shouldered to soigné in the course of a paragraph. However, style was just the tip of the iceberg for Sahlins’s work during this important period. In truth, we should not overplay the differences between the United States and France. Sahlins left anti-war protests in the United States only to arrive in Paris at the start of the explosive protests of May 1968. France was in the midst of a period of exceedingly creative and productive turmoil. The intellectual debates of the time no doubt seemed familiar to Sahlins: Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, for instance, bore a family resemblance to White’s culturology. LéviStrauss resembled White in other ways, as well: inspired by but not beholden to Boas, focused on kinship, wide in vision but fond of ethnographic particularity, and, above all, not afraid to write well. What’s more, in Paris the reconciliation of Marxism and structuralism seemed an urgent project – the Gallic analogue, as it were, of Sahlins’s own attempt to reconcile the material and symbolic sides of White’s legacy. Some see Sahlins’s Parisian interlude as the point at which he was irrevocably transformed from a “materialist” to an “idealist,” but this is too simple. After all, it was in Paris that Sahlins developed the essays that would later become Stone Age Economics (1972). The apogee of his substantivist work, “The Original Affluent Society,” for instance, appeared first (in French) in Les Temps Modernes (1968b), and “The Spirit of The Gift” (also in French) appeared in L’Homme (1968c). Indeed, it was in this period that the long essay, carefully honed, became Sahlins’s favourite form. Many of the essays in Stone Age Economics were destined to become classics, and “The Original Affluent Society,” the first essay in that book, is perhaps the best-known piece Sahlins has written. It is

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classic Sahlins: the encyclopedic synthesis of existing research, a Polanyi-White opposition to Western illusions of human nature, and a refined, elegant style. But whereas “Poor Man, Rich Man” relegated most of its scholarly apparatus to long footnotes, here Sahlins delved deep to produce quantitative data, juxtaposed quotations from primary sources, and supplied a large bibliography to lend proof to his claim. His point was that hunter-gatherers have more leisure time because their cultures are not predicated on the premise of infinite need. In making it, Sahlins meant to invert images of primitive starvation and desperation, but he also made another point: a close analysis of the data reveal the truth, but that truth is obscured by the cultural assumptions of previous writers. It was the beginning of an approach that sought culture logic not only in the ethnographic material Sahlins examined, but in the motivations of his scholarly opponents. That Sahlins’s writings evoked other forms of received wisdom – on the ecological nobility of natural man, for instance, or that contemporary Indigenous populations are more or less relics of an earlier stage of social evolution – no doubt added to the piece’s appeal. The six years after his time in Paris and the publication of Culture and Practical Reason (1976b) marked several shifts in Sahlins’s career. The first was areal: In 1970 Sahlins began a major new research project in Hawai‘i, visiting Honolulu as a fellow at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, and thus adding a second field site at the other end of the Polynesian triangle from Fiji. This was also the time when Sahlins connected with historians of the Pacific in both Hawai‘i and Australia. Finally, it was during this time that Sahlins left Michigan. In 1972 he moved back to Chicago, his hometown, where he took up a position at the University of Chicago that he would hold for over a quarter century. These new influences invited Sahlins to think more thoroughly about the relation between culture, environment, economics, and history. His focus on the determination of human action by culture remained unchanged: culture determines action, not the appetitive desire or utilitarian calculation of individual actors. But what determines culture? Crude materialists such as Marvin Harris insisted that culture is an adaptation to the natural environment, while Lévi-Strauss argued that cultural structures are shaped by their own internal logics. White seemed to believe both things simultaneously. Which is it?



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An adequate answer, Sahlins felt, must “motivate” (as structuralists put it) or explain the particulars of ethnographic fact – another hallmark of his thought. In an interesting but little-read review of Lévi-Strauss’s work published in Scientific American before his time in Paris, Sahlins had submitted that Lévi-Strauss was wrong to argue that “empirically ascertained relations between relations and groups are illusory” (1966b: 132). Privileging invisible, ingeniously conceived structures did not satisfy “that incurable addiction to empirical explanation one sees in certain anthropologists” (133). In other words, Sahlins’s early quarrel with structuralism was that it drifted away from the evidence. After Paris, Sahlins felt structuralism provided exactly the sort of empirical explanation he sought – and provided it more thoroughly than evolutionary approaches. Here we see continuity in the criteria Sahlins uses to evaluate theories, as well as in the questions he asks. His changing answers reflect a continuity of thought, not a shift. Thus, in an early essay, “Esoteric Efflorescence in Easter Island” (1955), Sahlins attempted to explain the existence of moai (monumental stone heads found on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island), with reference to “cultural [i.e., social structural] and environmental factors,” but admitted that “without more specific information about the role of the statues in the entire culture than is available, the question of heads instead of bodies, or why human images rather than animal, cannot be definitively answered” (1046). From his post-Paris vantage point, Sahlins must have felt that materialism could only explain that something would be made, but not what. Sahlins’s Culture and Practical Reason (1976) decisively settled these questions for him. In a 1977 essay, Sahlins argued that the environment is “neither a specific determination nor a sufficient explanation” of culture (15). No compromise was logically consistent: if “practical reason” does not determine culture in toto (which it does not) then culture must be a sui generis force. Culture and Practical Reason remains Sahlins’s most explicitly “theoretical” work to date: the encyclopedic rigour that Sahlins brought to bear on earlier ethnographic studies was now used to address a variety of thinkers ranging from Habermas and Lukács to Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. Above all, the book was an engagement with Marx: it was an attempt to assess whether historical materialism or cultural anthropology could better understand human societies. While many of his colleagues argued that one could be either a materialist or an idealist,

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Sahlins argued a well-developed theory of culture could transcend this opposition itself. This is Sahlins’s most explicitly “culturalist” work but its themes are ones that Sahlins had pursued for decades. Throughout this period Sahlins continued producing Polanyian critiques of naive views of human nature, such as The Use and Abuse of Biology (1976d), his devastating critique of sociobiology. By now Sahlins believed that a critique of Hobbes has to be generalized into a critique of economistic thought itself, including of narrowly Marxist anthropologists. This approach is exemplified by Sahlins’s review of Harris’s account of Aztec cannibalism in “Culture as Protein and Profit” (1978b), which is unflinching in its insistence that (as he would put it in a later piece) cannibalism is always “symbolic” even when it is “real”: whatever energetic role human cannibalism has played in the human diet, that role by itself is not sufficient to explain the elaborate cultural forms that have surrounded it. But if the evidence clearly demonstrated that cannibalism is not the result of dietetic needs, what motivated Harris’s belief that it is? Sahlins argued that the idea had cultural appeal: it fit Harris’s deep-seated utilitarianism. Thus, Sahlins claimed his model could explain not only Aztec cannibalism better than cultural materialism, but also it could explain the cultural origins of Harris’s own analysis. Sahlins’s emphasis on the ethnographic minutiae of cannibalism and his rigorous, close reading of Harris’s argument exemplify his more general claims about the nature of culture and the duties of a rigorous anthropology. The Structure of the Conjuncture: 1976–1985 By the mid-1970s Sahlins had taken the problematics he inherited from White, Polanyi, and others and arrived at a sui generis account of culture. Now at Chicago, he would spend the next decade examining the implications that this model of culture had for causation and explanation in anthropology. Earlier in his career, Sahlins relied on the “layer cake” models of causation popular with evolutionary anthropology: the environment on the bottom as the prime mover, social structure above it and adapted to it, and ideology or “culture” as the frosting on top. If, however, culture is a sui generis force, then this account of the relation between these orders of determination can no longer be accurate. So how are they related? Sahlins’s answer to this question, the “structure



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of the conjuncture,” received its first presentation in “The State of the Art in Social/Cultural Anthropology” (1977), and he continued to develop it until it received a full portrait in Islands of History (1985a). Throughout this period, he tied this new model to the ethnographically exemplary case of the death of Captain Cook (see, e.g., Sahlins 1982a), and to historical anthropology more broadly. This meant dealing with “the relation between individual action and the cultural order” (Sahlins 1982b: 35). White had a strongly deterministic account of human action and so did structuralism, which “seemed … to exclude individual action and worldly practice, except as they represented the projection or ‘execution’ of the system in place” (Sahlins 1981a: 3). Yet, one could not live through the massive social changes of the 1960s and 1970s without believing that human beings could change the world. How, then, to understand agency without dismissing culture? Sahlins’s solution draws on Sartre’s Search for a Method (1963). Sartre sought to reconcile an existentialist commitment to human freedom with the Marxist argument that human beings are determined by their relation to the means of production; Sahlins’s solution was to argue that human beings have the agency to pursue their own existential projects, but that those projects are always expressed in the medium of a particular, determined situation that forms the context for those projects. Sartre was searching for a method, while Sahlins had just purified an object – a culture concept sufficiently robust to escape from the “practical theories” that reduced culture to “the social realization of a gainful ratio of material benefits to cost” (Sahlins 1977: 15). In response to Sartre’s question, “Do we have today the means to constitute a structural, historical anthropology?” (1963: xxxiv), Sahlins’s answer was a firm “yes”: “le jour est arrivé” (Sahlins 1985a: 72). Just as Sartre argued that “man is characterized above all by his going beyond a situation, and by what he succeeds in making of what he has been made” (1963: 91), so Sahlins argued that “life in society is not an automatic genuflection before the superorganic being but a continuous rearrangement of its categories in the project of personal being” (1982b: 42). No projects without a cultural background, but no worldly execution of culture without specific projects. Like Sartre, Sahlins insisted that humans always have a uniqueness and ability to choose which is the result of their particularity as individuals (although unlike Sartre, Sahlins

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never used psychoanalysis to examine the formation of personality through history). Sahlins had French influences other than Sartre. Although Sahlins occasionally gestured to Bourdieu as an influence on his thought, which is something that authors such as Sherry Ortner (1984) have made much of, it was Fernand Braudel’s Annales school of history from which Sahlins drew many of his ideas. Braudel viewed history as acting at different speeds, ranging from the actions of kings to much slower, geographical time that produced the seas and mountains that Braudel believed have fundamentally shaped human history. Sahlins borrowed the Annales sense of history as a conjuncture of different temporal rhythms to replace a layer-cake model with an image of intersecting, multiply paced causal forces that combine in unpredictable ways. Yet, while Braudel’s focus on the longue durée “devalue[s] the unique event in favor of underlying recurrent structures” (Sahlins 1985a: 72), Sahlins’s version of history rose “from the abstract structure to the explication of the concrete event” (ibid.). Sahlins’s model of cultural action involves three moments: (1) instantiation, when general cultural structures realize themselves in particular situations whose very uniqueness offers a surfeit of reality that exceeds the category that subsumes them; (2) denouement, when history actually takes place in ways that may vary from the ideal structure; and (3) totalization, when the innovative use of structures in particular situations feeds back into the more general structures, altering them. The uniqueness of each event is due to the fact that it is a “structure of the conjuncture,” a nexus at which different orders of determination (cultural, meteorological, geographical) come together in ways that determine all of them, but which none totally determine. Further, as we shall see later, these moments of conjuncture create spaces of agency for different people in different ways. How ought one study these conjunctures? Boas, in Race, Language, and Culture (1982), famously advocated for “cosmography,” the idea that “the aim of science … is the investigation of phenomena themselves” rather than “the discovery of general laws” (641). Sahlins’s goal (he claimed in Culture in Practice) was a “cosmography of symbolic forms” (2000c: 31) – since cultural structures at any one point in time are the outcome of history, and their proper explanation is a particularizing, historical account of their transformations, a sort of Boasian culture history redux.



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As a result Sahlins turned to history, producing relatively few encyclopedic syntheses in this period. Mostly. In fact, his works during this period continue to make ideal-typical, generalizing distinctions between (for instance) prescriptive and performative societies, heroic versus narrative history, and the ideal type of the strangerkings in the Pacific. Although Sahlins claimed his empirical goal was now historical explanation, it seems generalizing synthesis was a hard thing for him to give up. Sahlins’s turn to particularity was enabled by the “discovery that peoples of the Pacific I had studied indeed had a history” (1985a: xviii). In Australia he found people such as James Davidson arguing in the new Journal of Pacific History (founded in 1966) that culture “contact has been two-sided. The reaction to it of non-European peoples has been in terms of the values and institutions of their own cultures … for a full understanding … the historian must analyze situations from both points of view” (Davidson 1966: 9–10). Here was a conjuncture to examine! And in Hawai‘i Sahlins worked with scholars like Dorothy Barrère (see Sahlins and Barrère 1973) who showed him the “archival abundance” (Sahlins 1985a: xviii) of the Pacific islands, and Greg Dening, who was experimenting with new forms of writing historical anthropology. The archival record – a record of colonialism – also helped Sahlins to resolve the issue of culture contact. In Moala Sahlins recognized that “intercultural contact” is “one of the two major selective forces that have shaped Moalan life,” arguing that “a society responds adaptively to cultural influences directed upon it from the outside, just as it responds to natural influences. Logically, there is no reason to exclude culture contact … from the study of cultural adaptation … no more than a biologist would ignore the effects of competitors when studying the adaptation of species” (Sahlins 1962a: 14). In his short textbook Tribesmen, Sahlins noted that an account of ecological adaptation should be complemented by “another, at least of equal length, on the relations of tribes to coexisting societies and the modifications in organization thus occasioned. Unfortunately, this has been a neglected branch of ecological research” (1968d: 44–5). A theory of the structure of the conjuncture, combined with rich archival material, now made an account of culture contact possible, and this is what Sahlins turned to next. The centrepiece for his new method was an analysis of the death of Captain Cook, an example he presented briefly in the mid-1970s (Sahlins 1975), and then

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refined in a French collection (1979), before developing it more fully in Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981a) and finally Islands of History (1985a). Sahlins was not the first person to tell Cook’s story – the Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau had done so one hundred and twenty years earlier (Silva 2004: 17–20). But the death of Cook provided a way to show that Sahlins’s new approach connected the diverse pieces of his argument: individual agency, the conditioning power of cultural structures, the ironies of culture contact, and the unpredictable nature of history and the structure of the conjuncture. According to Sahlins, Cook’s death was the result of a chance series of events that were rendered meaningful by the cultural contexts in which they occurred: Cook’s arrival in Hawai‘i during the makahiki season led some Hawaiians to see him as an incarnation of the deity Lono, but his return to the islands after experiencing a storm at sea violated Hawaiian expectations – as did his behaviour when he returned. The final irony of Cook’s death was his dual apotheosis: in both British and Hawaiian culture, he was considered more than merely human. Anahulu and Obeyesekere: 1985–1992 The period between 1985 and 1992 was largely one of consolidation for Sahlins. Islands of History was very favourably reviewed. In an extremely influential piece, Sherry Ortner (1984) put Sahlins (along with Bourdieu) centre stage as a definitive solution to the ongoing tension between structure and agency. Islands of History was also warmly received by Hawaiian scholars, such as HaunaniKay Trask, who wrote that Sahlins had written “a remarkable, indeed beautiful, book” that “deserves to be celebrated” (1985: 787). There were also criticisms. Some Marxists considered Sahlins a turncoat idealist and argued that Islands of History seemed devoid of analysis of power, political economy, and colonialism – the very things at the centre of, for instance, Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History, which was published around the same time. Others argued that Sahlins’s model did not allow for “endogenous” change and that, on his account, only in certain unusual cases of external forces would cultures transform. Despite – or perhaps because of – this attention, Sahlins once again became central to anthropological debates. Islands of History used the microdynamics of a single encounter to make a theoretical point. Yet the microdynamics of a single encounter



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were not really the same thing as a full-length historical study. Thus, in 1983 Sahlins began a large NSF-funded team project with Patrick Kirch, Jocelyn Linnekin, and others to produce a full-blown ethnography that exemplified his historical approach. The result, Anahulu, was published in 1992. What Moala was to Sahlins’s evolution-based Fiji research, Anahulu was to Hawai‘i and his project of historical anthropology. Taking the question of cultural contact beyond the moments of initial encounter, Anahulu attempted to chart the course of the Hawaiian engagement with the West, arguing that Hawaiians neither “resisted” nor “submitted” to colonialism. Rather, they interpreted Western imperialism in culturally specific ways and integrated them into their own cultural system with consequences that could not have been predicted simply by the nature of the forces from outside. The book, in two volumes, is extraordinarily detailed and comprehensive. Anahulu was a critical success, winning the 1998 Stanley Prize. But it has not been as widely read as Islands of History. For one thing, it is a specialist work on Hawaiian history, and non-specialists looking for a quick summary of Sahlins’s theoretical innovations were disappointed. The book was also not well received by the Hawaiian studies community. As a visiting professor at the Center for Pacific Island Studies, Sahlins had helped encourage and support Hawaiian scholars like Lilikala Kame‘elehiwa and Davianna McGregor, and others. Now, however, they found his portrayal of post-contact Hawai‘i offensive for the way it emphasizes the mobility of Hawaiians (rather than their rootedness in the land) and for its portrayal of Hawaiian nobility as greedy elites who exploited commoners during the sandalwood era. But the biggest impediment for Anahulu’s reception has undoubtedly been Gananath Obeyesekere’s 1992 book The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, whose criticism of Sahlins’s work on Cook drew attention away from Anahulu and back to Sahlins’s work in the 1980s. Others had taken issue with the historical details of Sahlins’s analysis of Hawaiian history (e.g., Bergendorff et al. 1988), but Obeyesekere’s volume was a kind of critique that Sahlins had not experienced before: monograph-length, and strongly worded, it came at a time when a rising tide of post-colonial scholarship was taking issue with the epistemological self-confidence of white, privileged academics. The result was the “Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate,” a scholarly exchange conducted largely by Obeyesekere and his reviewers. Sahlins’s single intervention of substance was

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his short book How “Natives” Think (1995); for an overview, see Borofsky (1997), and for a history from a kanaka maoli (indigenous Hawaiian) perspective, see Silva (2004).) Twenty years earlier, Sahlins had outflanked Harris by arguing that a sui generis notion of culture could explain not only Aztec cannibalism, but also Harris’s explanation of Aztec cannibalism. Now the tables were turned: Obeyesekere argued that Sahlins’s explanation of Cook’s death was a result of Sahlins’s own Western “mythmodels” that exoticized the Other. Although argued in the language of ethnohistorical minutiae, the debate was widely followed because it addressed broader disciplinary anxieties about ethics and epistemology. As Geertz noted at the time, “After one reads these two having at one another … whatever happened to Cook, and why, seems a good deal less important … than the questions they raise about how it is we are to go about making sense of the acts and emotions of distant peoples in remote times. What does ‘knowing’ about ‘others’ properly consist in? Is it possible? Is it good?” (1995: 4). In fact, the debate fit awkwardly into existing post-colonial frames. Charles Taylor (1994) has argued that the politics of recognition requires two moments, a “politics of universalism, emphasizing the equal dignity of all citizens” (37) and “a politics of difference … [which] recognize[s] the unique identity of this individual or group, their distinctness from everyone else” (38). In this period it was often the mainstream white academics advocating universalism, with insurgent post-colonial scholars attempting to “provincialize Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000) insisting on the parochial nature of the West’s purportedly universal standards. In fact, it was Obeyesekere who pursued a politics of universalism, emphasizing the coevalness of Hawaiians with “us” (whoever that pronoun denotes) and analyzing Hawaiian action as the expression of universal human nature. Sahlins, in contract, argued that in Obeyesekere’s account “distinctive patterns of belief and action get swallowed up in common Western senses of rationality. Their own scheme of things is resolved into a philosophy of empirical realism that pretends to be human and universal – or else, in other arguments distinctive of ‘natives’ by contrast to Western-colonial mythologists” (Sahlins in Borofsky 1997: 273). Ironically, in this debate it was the third world intellectual who advocated for an Enlightenment universalist position and Sahlins, the “old white man,” who insisted on a politics of radical difference.



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Ultimately, academic attention moved on. By the time Obeyesekere responded to Sahlins in the afterword to the second edition of Apotheosis, in 1997, anthropologists had grown weary of the debate and its often-heated tone. Although there was no final accounting, many felt that Sahlins had won, if only on points. Afterology, Despondency Theory, and the Anthropology of Modernity: 1992–2001 In retrospect, Ortner was wrong to see “practice theory” as the future of anthropology. As the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate showed, theory in the 1990s would instead be focused on crises of representation, ethics, and epistemology associated with the terms “postcolonialism,” “postmodernism,” and “‘post-structuralism” – a group of theories that Sahlins, following Mraz, labelled the “afterologies.” It is probably too simple to lump these diverse approaches under a single label, nonetheless, the label does convey Sahlins’s sense of profound dissatisfaction with these movements. From 1992 to 2001, Sahlins had moved from particularistic historical ethnography to a more general “anthropology of modernity” (for an overview of this, see Robbins 2005), which addresses issues of epistemology and power in the context of the globalizing world of the post–Cold War period. Was the rise of capitalism inevitable? Is cultural specificity disappearing? Can anthropologists speak authoritatively about these topics? In examining these questions – no, no, and yes were his answers – Sahlins sought to challenge the afterologists and continue his dialogue with Marxism. Sahlins’s ethnographic focus in this period expanded to include China. In a paper written during a 1988 visit to Beijing (1990a), Sahlins argued that the Qing Empire’s lack of interest in Western commodities was exemplary of the way that non-Western people could assimilate capitalism into their own cultural schemes, “making modernity the servant of custom, rather than its master” (80). In his Radcliffe-Brown lecture of 1988 Sahlins combined Chinese, Pacific, and Native North American material together to argue that differences in nineteenth-century global capitalism were in each case mediated by pre-existing cosmological cum political structures: ruling chiefs in Hawai‘i and the Northwest coast of America were interested in acquiring different things, for different purposes, and with different consequences (Sahlins 1989b). Global capitalism

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was always locally understood, and was itself transformed by its encounter with other cultural logics. This argument about globalization was meant to apply to the twentieth century as well as the nineteenth. In Tribesmen (1968) Sahlins argued that “modern civilization knows no borders: those curious peoples beyond the pale have been drawn into the main sphere in the course of Europe’s four-century planetary reconnaissance. Once discovered, they were rapidly colonized, baptized, and culturally traumatized … And now, having bit deep into native custom, civilization allows itself the luxury of an intellectual digestion … anthropology … becomes an inquest into the corpse of one society presided over by members of another” (1–2). By the 1990s Sahlins was criticizing this position, not advocating it. He labelled this belief “sentimental pessimism,” part of a broader “despondency theory” (a riff on the “dependency theory” of world system theory), which Sahlins believed was too pessimistic about the chances of Indigenous culture. He now drew on contemporary ethnographic data from Alaska, Papua New Guinea, and other places to demonstrate that, on the contrary, the global trend was toward the “indigenization of modernity”: local people were using the materials of globalization to become “more themselves than ever before.” “Culture,” Sahlins claimed, “is not a disappearing object” (2000b). This was both an empirical generalization and a theoretical riposte. In denouncing the omnipresent force of Western hegemony, Sahlins argued, afterologists implicitly endorsed colonial fantasies of power as real. Furthermore, as their goal shifted from analysis to moral judgment, the work of analyzing the details, Sahlins claimed, was being forgotten. Although he disagreed with dependency theory’s gloomy diagnosis for Indigenous people, Sahlins shared Marxists’ epistemological confidence – he was, in short, willing to speak truth to power. On the other hand, post-colonialism, he believed, “put the very possibility of a historical anthropology – maybe even the possibility of a comparative cultural anthropology – at issue” (Sahlins in Borofsky 1997: 272). Against “poststructuralist litanies about the contested and unstable character of cultural logics” Sahlins argued that “polyphony is not cacophony” (2002b: 27) and that there was “a noncontradictory way … of describing the contradictions, a system of and in the differences” (2000c: 488), since “in order for the categories to be contested at all, there must be a common system of intelligibility” (ibid.).



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Furthermore, Sahlins spent an increasing amount of time arguing that “ethnography has always known that cultures were never as bounded, self-contained, and self-sustaining as postmodernism pretends” (1999c: 411). Sahlins’s publications in this period argued not only for the vitality of local cultures, but that afterologists made a straw man of anthropology. In his own intellectual autobiography (see the introduction to Culture in Practice 2000c) and other works, he helped refresh the discipline’s memory of its past accomplishments and findings. In some senses, Sahlins was swimming against the current in these years. He argued for the value of traditional cultural anthropology and for the vitality of Indigenous people and their cultural projects. These things were not typically paired, since the sentimental pessimism of dependency theory relied on authoritative denouncement of the death of local cultures, and post-colonialism attempted to reclaim the agency of Indigenes by questioning the epistemological authority of first-world scholars. Power, Events, and Human Nature: 2001–2010 Although Sahlins had written for years about power, politics, and individual agency, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan gave these topics new urgency for him: what were the cultural origins of the realpolitik that drove US foreign policy? How could a single event like 9/11 have such incredible repercussions? How could the decisions of a US president have such power to shape the historical record? These were the issues Sahlins took up in this decade, often refracted through his Fijian material. As he dealt with issues of war, empire, and human nature, Sahlins drew on themes from his earlier work, often combining them in new ways with classical ethnographic material. Apologies to Thucydides (2004a) was his main book to come out during this period, but before discussing it let us first discuss its deeper roots in Sahlins’s thought. Marshall Sahlins had always opposed Western misconceptions of human nature, and so it is not surprising that he saw the influence of his bête noir, Hobbes, at work in post-9/11 America. “The American war policy is based upon a certain ethnocentric notion of human nature” (2009a), Sahlins wrote. In this period he returned to work begun in the mid-1990s on “the native anthropology of Western cosmology” in a series of essays designed to sketch out the culture history of the folk theories motivating America’s power

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politics (Sahlins 2005a, 2008d). Having described and defended the genealogy and adequacy of the culture concept, he now described the shape, form, and history of wrong-headed theories of human nature in Western thought. 9/11 was nothing if not an event, and after the turn of the millennium Sahlins returned to the role of events in shaping history. One of the challenges raised to Islands of History was that it had no account of endogenous sources of change. As early as 1991 Sahlins had responded with an important essay entitled “The Return of the Event, Again” which argues that cultural structures sometimes amplify the agency of individuals, who then became a source of novelty that transforms structures. Thus, although Cook was an exogenous force of change in Hawai‘i, whose influence was amplified by his place in Hawaiian and British cultural schemes, in the Fiji wars the chiefs of Bau and Rewa were endogenous sources of change whose agency was amplified by their chiefly status. Sahlins had used ethnography from this Fijian conflict several times before to discuss war and power (see, e.g., “War in the Fiji Islands” 1987), emphasizing the cultural mediation at the heart of even the most punitive force. His essay “The Discovery of the True Savage” (1994a), for instance, examines the story of Charley Savage, the Swedish man who introduced firearms to Fijian warfare. From the outside, Savage’s story appeared straightforward: his “advanced” technology gave tremendous power to its white owners as they colonized Indigenous areas of realpolitik. Sahlins, on the other hand, searched the historical record to discover the “true Savage” – a man whose political force is a result of the cosmopolitical order in Fiji, where chiefly politics are predominant. It was not his weapon, Sahlins argues, but the way it disrupted chiefly battles, that made Savage an important political player. Even the dominance of the colonizer is, in Sahlins’s account, underwritten and shaped by the Indigenous cultural system, and narratives of Western power remain fundamentally a Fijian story. Just as force is culturally mediated, so too is disorder. In publications throughout this period Sahlins compared the events of the Peloponnesian War with the situation in occupied Iraq. These “wars of all against all” were not the result of people stripped down to their basic human nature, but of culturally specific projects of domination of local people. “It takes a lot of culture,” Sahlins quipped, “to make a state of nature” (2011d: 27).



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In fact, Sahlins had long rubbed shoulders with classicists. In graduate school he attended Polanyi’s seminar with Moses Finley. Sahlins also knew Jean-Pierre Vernant and his school, who like Sahlins himself came from Marxist/leftist backgrounds but sought a humanistic structuralist-inflected approach to their material. And finally, at Chicago Sahlins knew scholars such as Nicholas Rudall and James Redfield. Sahlins had dabbled in classical material for some time although much of it remained unpublished (see, e.g., Sahlins 2011a – which was written decades before it was published). The highlight of this work was Sahlins’s 2004 Apologies to Thucydides (helpfully digested in Sahlins 2005e). This volume addresses issues of empire, power, realpolitik, and the amplification of individual agency by triangulating three ethnographic areas: nineteenthcentury Fiji, twentieth-century America, and fifth-century Athens. It is structured as an extended comparison of the Bau-Rewa conflict and the Peloponnesian War. Here, Sahlins moves beyond his old foil Hobbes to one of Hobbes’s decisive influences, Thucydides. Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War was the canonical Western account of political conflict, and Thucydides’s political realism was the forerunner to the versions of economics and political science that shaped American foreign policy. In Apologies Sahlins demonstrated that the paradigmatic Western account of political conflict does not make sense even of the case from which it generalizes: Thucydides did not understand the way culture shaped the Peloponnesian War, a conflict whose viciousness was shaped by Greek cultures of honour, pride, and thalassocracy – the system of “rule by sea” which Greece shared with the Fijian polity of Bau. Why, Sahlins asked, should we use Thucydidean realism in our contemporary social analysis if it could not make sense of Greece? In many ways, however, the most charming part of the book is its sparkling middle section, which discusses the structural amplification of agency in the case of Bobby Thompson’s home run that won baseball’s National League pennant in 1951, and the custody battle over Elián González. Each exemplifies one of two different patterns of amplification: one conjunctural, the other structural. Despite his call for a “cosmography of cultural forms” (2000c: 31), Sahlins still seemed to admit that “there is pleasure too, and some intellectual reward, in discovering the broad patterns” (1963b: 285). Apologies also returned to and enlarged this critique of afterology, now called “Leviathanology,” in order to show the genealogical link

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between Thucydides, Hobbes, and Leviathanology. As part of this he expanded his critique of afterology to include Foucault, whose focus on the ubiquity of power reminded Sahlins of Hobbes’s vision of life as a “war/of all against all” and whose notion of “discourse” seemed to him to posit a determination of social life so encompassing and powerful that it seemed to be Hobbes’s leviathan in postmodern guise. It was during this period that Sahlins, now an emeritus professor, made the move from author to editor when he became the executive publisher of Prickly Paradigm Press. The press – then called Prickly Pear – began in 1993 as a UK-based project of Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw, and had gone through several permutations (the British branch of this scholarly cactus is still alive and well). In 2002 Prickly Paradigm began producing pamphlets that continued Sahlins’s engaged, well-written, and essay-length polemics. Now, more than forty pamphlets later, the press has produced work on contemporary academic politics, as well as cutting-edge theoretical interventions by authors such as David Graeber, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Prickly Paradigm also became a forum for Sahlins to oppose anthropological collaboration with the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly forty years after the teach-ins against Vietnam, Sahlins now found himself arguing against Human Terrain System, the program conducting social science in aid of the occupation which an anthropologist dedicated to helping the military “aim better” (Jacobsen 2008). Sahlins helped support a variety of publications opposed to this sort of work, both in his pamphlet series (González 2009, Network of Concerned Anthropologists 2009, Jacobsen 2009) and more generally (Kelly et al. 2010). Life from Without: 2010– Recently Sahlins’s focus has swung back toward the general and, indeed, the human condition more broadly. In the last few years he has tried to substantiate the “modest claim” that “the elementary forms of kinship, politics and religion are all one” (2008c: 197) because they all involve gaining “life from without” (179). There are several interrelated pieces to this broad claim, and many of them deal with themes that Sahlins had long explored in his writings. The first is the phenomenon of the stranger-king: an



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exogenous ruler who usurps power from autochthons and becomes their leader. In the 1980s Sahlins demonstrated the presence of this ideal type in Polynesian and Indo-European cultures and suggested it had broad applicability to a number of societies. In making this claim that “the political appears here as an aspect of the cosmological” (1985a: 90) Sahlins was opposing “the quaint Western concept that domination is a spontaneous expression of the nature of society, and beyond that, of the nature of man” (75–6). Now, after this point had been amplified in Apologies to Thucydides, Sahlins returned to it, arguing that stranger-kingship was a political form of “global extent and historical range” (2008c: 178). This was so because the underlying dynamic of stranger-kingship is, Sahlins claims, a fundamental structure of the human condition: it involves the “transaction of vitality” from a “potent alterity” to one’s self (2008c: 177). Now Sahlins went on to claim that there are other forms of politics that feature the same dynamic, drawing increasingly not only from Polynesia and China, but the space between them: the wider sphere of “Austronesian” and southeast Asian cultures. Head-hunters, for instance, incorporated outside enemies in order to gain power. Indeed, even in cases of polities ruled by “cosmocraters” whose legitimacy is rooted in the divine orders, acquisition of objects from peripheral spaces is proof of sovereign potency: thus Chinese emperors used tribute from nomadic peoples as proof they enjoyed the Mandate of Heaven. Peripheral people, in turn, often used items from these centres to boost their own internal legitimacy. In contrast to the realpolitik of Thucydides and his successors, Sahlins now claims that only a “real-politics of the marvellous” (2010b: 118) can explain the particularities of actually existing political systems. Two things follow from this: first, that much of economic life could be understood as the search for objects that were valuable because they were remote or “other” (Sahlins 2010b). Additionally, it becomes clear that bounded notions of culture are inadequate to understanding societies, since much of what shaped them involved their interactions with one another. In the 1980s Sahlins demonstrated that structuralism was not ignorant of practice. In the 1990s he argued that anthropology had never considered culture to be “bounded.” Now, Sahlins showed that order was “intercultural” (2010b) and spread across the boundaries of polities and ethnic groups.

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At the root of this focus on alterity is, Sahlins claims, a basis in deeper structures of kinship. In his short book What Kinship Is – And Is Not (2013a) Sahlins argues that kinship is an experience of mutuality and intersubjective identification – an argument that is supported, he argues (2011c: 230–2), by recent work in evolutionary behaviouralism. The use of alterity in religious, economic, and political life is based on a deeper, more primary human experience of mutuality of being: the specieswide sense that kinsfolk “participate intrinsically in each other’s existence” (Sahlins 2013a: ix). Marshall Sahlins has shown no signs of slowing down politically. His two most recent areas of interest focus on the integrity of the academy. First, he took the unusual step of resigning from the National Academy of Science of the United States – one of the most prestigious institutions in American intellectual life – in February 2013 (see Sahlins 2013b). The resignation was a protest against the Academy’s role in furthering American imperialism, and also the election of Napoleon Chagnon to the academy. For Sahlins, Chagnon’s unethical fieldwork and socio-biological approach is a model of how not to conduct research, empirically flawed, and morally dubious. Sahlins has also been vocal in his opposition to the Confucius Institutes (Sahlins 2015b) increasingly present in the American academy. These institutes, funded by the Chinese government but hosted by American universities, are antithetical to academic values, Sahlins maintains, because they present a tendentious image of China and promote censorship and self-censorship similar to the government prohibitions on discussion of politically charged topics in Chinese universities. Amazingly, roughly two decades into his emeritus career, Sahlins is still fashion-forward in theoretical circles. He has been an important supporter of new trends in anthropological publishing and theory. HAU, the first major international peer-reviewed, open-access online journal in anthropology, draws heavily on Marshall Sahlins in its founding theoretical statement (da Col and Graeber 2011), and Sahlins contributed a piece (2011a) to the inaugural issue. HAU is just part of a more general rapprochement between American, British, and French academic traditions that Sahlins has helped support. Sahlins continues to connect English speakers to francophone thought, receiving the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2011 (Harms 2011). In 2014 “ontology” became the buzzword in American anthropological circles, partially because of the roundtable



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“The Ontological Turn in French Philosophical Anthropology” in which Sahlins participated (see Sahlins 2014a) and which John Kelly (a co-editor of this volume) helped organize. In this and in other smaller publications (e.g., Sahlins 2013c) Sahlins continues to influence the discipline of anthropology by promoting the work of others. In mentioning this influence, however, we should not leave the impression that Marshall Sahlins has stopped producing his own work. But having covered Sahlins’s career (so far), let us turn to the essays in this volume and examine how they take up some themes in Sahlins’s work.

Some Structures of the Longue durée , and Their Transformations At the beginning of this essay we claimed that Sahlins’s thought was coherent, even though he contributed to a diverse array of areas. Contra a common narrative that broke his career into an earlier material and a later idealist period, we have endeavoured to demonstrate that Marshall Sahlins has shown considerable intellectual continuity over the course of his career. We now turn to the final task of this introduction: to generalize about some of the structures of the longue durée of Sahlins’s practice of anthropology and to examine how the essays by our authors represent transformations of these structures. As we mentioned at the start of this introduction, Sahlins has never produced a school or clique – there is no “Sahlinsological” approach to anthropology. He has never tried to make himself hegemonic by flooding the job market with graduate students; he disdains imitators; and his rigorous, humanistic anthropology is not doctrinaire. Rather, Sahlins’s influence is that of the atelier – one can see his colleagues developing their own unique styles in the course of their time spent in his workshop. For these reasons, the essays gathered here do not have a program or agenda, but an esprit de corps. The individual chapters are variations on the themes in Sahlins’s work. One fundamental feature of Sahlins’s thought is his demand for ethnographic adequacy. Throughout his career, Sahlins has insisted that we recognize the “specificity and historicity of cultures” (2009a), the full particularity of human lives. Ethnographic facts – and

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they are facts, for Sahlins – are in and of themselves interesting to Sahlins, and he believes that we owe them our attention and the duty to describe them accurately. It is for this reason that he argues that anthropology must be a “cosmography of cultural forms,” a discipline in which “anthropologists rise from the abstract structure to the explication of the concrete event” (1985a: 72). We see this commitment to rich ethnography in nearly all of the chapters in this volume. This sentiment is perhaps best summed up by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha when she writes here that “our most lasting contribution as anthropologists might be – after all is said and done – data, fieldwork, and the stories they unveil. Just that.” In an era where anthropologists are on the lookout for the latest theoretical fad, Sahlins and his colleagues share a commitment to the value of ethnography for ethnography’s sake. A good example of this concern with the particular is Jocelyn Linnekin’s chapter. Her examination of conceptions of kingship in nineteenth-century Samoa reflects several themes in Sahlins’s work: the historical anthropology of the Pacific, the cultural nature of power, and the mediation of colonial power by endogenous cultural structures. The history of imperial intrusion into Samoa, she argues, is one of constant misrecognition of Samoan politico-religious dynamics. Linnekin demonstrates how the notion of a single Samoan “kingship” developed as the result of a conjuncture of culture systems in the course of Samoa’s entanglement with the world system. Through the force of their gaze, however, external “preconceptions” came to have a structuring effect on political struggle in Samoa, albeit an uneven one. At the same time, Linnekin insists, Western pressures were not “hegemony” and Samoan “resistance” to external forces did not have in its armoury only “weapons for the weak.” By painting a finely detailed picture of the constituent inaccuracies in outsider views of kingship and their complex and regimenting effect as they motivated actors to intervene in Samoan chiefly politics, Linnekin avoids lapsing into simplistic discourses of objectivity, oppression, and resistance. By painting a truer, more ethographically adequate, and more ambivalent picture of Samoan history, Linnekin demonstrates the utility of Sahlins’s claim that colonialism is always mediated by the culture of the colonized. Her close reading of Samoan history exemplifies the scrupulous examination of historical record that Sahlins recommends to others, and



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displays the ways in which his culture theory can illuminate this material – all of it – in its particularity. Another constant in Sahlins’s work is humour and a gimlet eye – his ironic, acerbic wit often takes aim at the personal foibles of the colonial forces he examines. He shares this approach with his colleague and historical anthropologist Bernard Cohn (1987). Sahlins, like Cohn, has always been a master of irony, the bemused recognition of the gap between the ideal and its realization – indeed, the structure of the conjuncture is a fundamentally ironic social theory. Kaplan’s essay here continues this tradition with a fine-grained examination of the ironies of ethnography in colonial Fiji, and the way that one colonizer remade himself in the course of representing Fijians. Kaplan’s chapter about The Hill Tribes of Fiji (the book) and the hill tribes of Fiji (the people) provides a pocket biography of the transformation of an expatriate in Fiji from a Jew to a “Roman” – that is, from outsider to exemplar of colonial British rule – while, in the background, a local Fijian religious leader transforms himself from traditional figure to Jewish prophet. Kaplan’s point is made in the middle space where these identities cross: conventional history might enquire into the objective truths that these transformations “obscure” or “hide,” but an ethnographic history (as her opening quote from Sahlins reminds us) takes these transformations as its object. In the end the heart of Kaplan’s essay is a playful indulgence in a particularly juicy bit of particularity, something Sahlins will no doubt appreciate. This focus on the foibles of the colonizers and the agency of the Indigenes need not, however, be restricted to the nineteenth-century Pacific. Carneiro da Cunha’s chapter continues this ironic sensibility by telling the story of the spontaneous rise of the cult of a saint in the Brazilian Amazon, an endogenous appropriation of Catholicism. Many authors have focused on the indigenization of Christianity, but Carneiro da Cunha offers a unique twist on this theme by studying how the church then reappropriated this appropriation. The piece splendidly illustrates how structures are enmeshed in (and indeed, create) power struggles, how their repeated iteration can produce effects that appear, on the surface, to be contradictory – one of Sahlins’s main points against the afterologists. Like Kaplan and Linnekin, Carneiro da Cunha draws on historical records to demonstrate the time depth of the appropriative

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dynamics she describes, even though the case she studies occurs in the present. More fundamentally, however, Carneiro da Cunha’s richly detailed case study demonstrates ethnographers’ need not be apologetic for finding what they study interesting, and how a rigorous, humanistic anthropology can make illuminated moments of ethnographic particularity. This theme of the indigenization of external sources was part of Sahlins’s preoccupation with Indigenous cultural vitality in the early 1990s. We can see it in Carneiro da Cunha’s chapter, as well as in Fienup-Riordan’s. Fienup-Riordan describes the controversy surrounding the construction of a road near a sacred site in Alaska. With Sahlins, she argues that underlying what others might consider a “realpolitik” of interest represents culturally given ends being pursued using culturally given means. Her essay is particularly noteworthy for its demonstration that the “indigenization of modernity” is not a shallow affair. Where some have fastened on relatively superficial signs of difference, Fienup-Riordan convincingly demonstrates that the “past is old and the future is traditional” in a deep and compelling sense. As we hope the reader can see, Fienup-Riordan’s account of Indigenous agency shares important connections with Linnekin’s chapter, even though it takes place in a far-from-tropical location and nearly a century afterwards. The flip side of this demand for ethnographic adequacy is Sahlins’s critique of scholars who develop theories based on their cultural presuppositions rather than the empirical record. As different as they are, Sahlins believes socio-biology, cultural materialism, economics, postmodernism, and afterologies all share the same thing: a willingness to make a “lousy bargain with ethnographic realities, giving up what we know about them in order to study them”; see Waiting for Foucault, Still (2002b: 20). Sahlins often uses Sartre’s language to express this. In Search for a Method Sartre (1963: 28) accuses Marxist authors such as Lukács of “the terrorist practice of ‘liquidating the particularity.’” Indeed, if anything, Sahlins’s work suggests that anthropological particularism is more scientific than a quantitative or nomothetic approach. If the essence of science is an openness to putting one’s cultural conceptions at “risk” in acts of reference to empirical reality, then it is anthropology that has the better track record than those supposed sciences (from economics to socio-biology to Marxism) that amount largely to the projection of Western



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cosmological schemes onto the observed world. Rather than deal with the “equivocal givens of experience” they deal instead with “general particularities” (Sartre 1963: 28). As a result “analysis [on their account] consists solely of getting rid of detail, in forcing the signification of certain events, in denaturing facts or even inventing a nature for them in order to discover it later underneath them, as their substance” (27). Citing Sartre’s image of the “bath of sulphuric acid” that these beliefs throw particularities into, Sahlins (1976d: 15–16) insists that as a result “an understanding of the phenomenon is gained at the cost of everything that we know about it. We have to suspend our comprehension of what it is. But a theory ought to be judged as much by the ignorance it demands as by the knowledge it purports to afford.” We can see this critique of Western cultural models most explicitly in Tcherkézoff’s chapter. The best place to begin is his multiply recursive title. Sahlins has a long history of punning and allusive titles – for instance, he playfully entitled the first chapter of Islands of History “Supplement to the Voyage of Cook,” an allusion to Diderot’s “Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville,” which used Bougainville’s accounts of Polynesians to criticize European sexual morality. In doing so, Sahlins implicitly styled himself the anthropological philosophe drawing lessons from an English, rather than French, explorer. Tcherkézoff’s essay reverses this figure: now it is Sahlins himself who is the great way-finder of historical anthropology and Tcherkézoff’s supplement the scholarly supplement. But like Sahlins and Diderot, Tcherkézoff’s modesty obscures the genuine contribution that he makes. In his chapter Tcherkézoff returns to the sexuality that accompanied many of the first Pacific voyages. Through a close analysis of the written records of two early patrols he reconstructs the cultural dynamic that underlay these early couplings. Tcherkézoff’s account of the politics and power of these lessthan-idyllic encounters fleshes out the dynamics of sexual contact about which the Hawaiian material was often not sufficiently precise. At the same time, Tcherkézoff shows convincingly, as Sahlins would be the first to argue, that these encounters were embedded in and motivated by a cosmological scheme. Tcherkézoff’s piece is a valuable parting shot in the Obeyesekere-Sahlins debate by demonstrating that one need not succumb to Obeyesekere’s model of universal rationality in order to understand the fraught nature of sexual violence in the early modern Pacific.

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Tcherkézoff’s punning title points to another aspect of Sahlins’s work: his allusive, humanistic style. Several chapters in this volume share Sahlins’s and Tcherkézoff’s word play. We can see it in Martha Kaplan’s invocation of the Hill Tribes of Fiji and the Hill Tribes of Fiji, as well as Carneiro da Cunha’s “Chaisé-croisé” (cross-over), a title whose subtitle includes the chiasmic (crossed-over) phrase “Christianity appropriated Indigenous appropriation of Christianity.” Perhaps the best exemplar of the stylistic freedom Sahlins practices, however, is Greg Dening. Dening’s autobiographical narrative traces the course of Pacific history where his life and Sahlins’s intersect and diverge. This is the most reflexive and personal piece in the collection. This intimacy and immediacy is all the more bittersweet given that this was one of the last pieces that Dening wrote before he died. Dening’s essay is the least “scientific” in the volume, both in tone and in argument. In contrast to the story of continuity we have told of Sahlins’s biography, Dening’s own life story is more ambivalent and vulnerable. When our understanding of the same historical story changes over the course of our lives, can we really speak of unvarnished truth? Dening’s question challenges Sahlins’s epistemological self-confidence, but in doing so reaffirms their joint commitment to a humanistic and respectful account of Pacific peoples. Sahlins’s focus on ethnographic adequacy and the weakness of ethnocentric Western models makes him skeptical about the possibility of generalization. Consider this passage from his short textbook Tribesmen in which Sahlins expresses profound ambivalence about generalization: Different countries, different customs: no two tribes are the same in detail. Tribesmen, moreover, are like all people and any person: the more familiar with them one becomes the more difficult it is to recall one’s first general impressions. So what I am about to do – which is to formulate a generalized design of tribal culture – is plainly hazardous and perhaps futile. But such is the magic of the sociologist’s “ideal type” that, founded as it is on actual or pretended ignorance of the empirical diversity, inadequate as it is as a representation of complex realities, primitive as it may be as an intellectual procedure, it can yield remarkable insights into the particular case. (1968d: 14)



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Despite his suspicion of generalization, however, Sahlins conti­ nues to do it. As his description on the University of Chicago Anthropology Department website notes, “From time to time he drops … ethnographic particularities for high-flying cultural theory.” We can see this, for instance, in the encyclopedic syntheses he has produced over the course of his career, from Social Stratification in Polynesia to What Kinship Is – And Is Not. Although Sahlins insists that we focus on the particular, at times his work looks a great deal like Max Weber’s or Charles Tilly’s. Sahlins has distinguished between chiefly and big-man societies, performative and prescriptive societies, and generalized for instance and systemic and conjunctural agency. His writing is littered with generalized processural dynamics such as the structure of the conjuncture, transvaluation, and parochialization. In fact, he often invokes master abstractionist Gregory Bateson and his concept of schismogenesis. The closest thing to an encyclopedic synthesis we have in this collection is Jonathan Friedman’s contribution. In it, Friedman combines a critique of afterologies with a survey of European political culture to argue for a strongly realist position. On this account, structures are not heuristic constructs designed by the analyst, he claims, they are really there. Friedman thus takes issue with “postmodern” approaches that, he argues, claim that human beings are infinitely free to act. In contrast, he argues, action is culturally determined, culturally situated, and culturally interpreted. Friedman makes this claim by comparing two assassinations committed by people at opposite ends of the political spectrum. By examining changes in the political fields of European countries in the past forty years, Friedman shows how the assassins actually shared political positioning. Ethnic and political conflicts that result from change in contemporary Europe, he argues, can be understood in terms of the ongoing transformation of a political culture in which diaspora and hybridity are not a sign of a lack of structure and a postmodern freedom, but rather of the enduring cultural determination of human action. Here Friedman’s pan-European view (which even touches on the US political scene) comes to resemble Sahlins’s discussion of interculturality in the transformation of basic political structures; however, where Sahlins traces variations in the theme of strangerkingship, Friedman traces changes in “Occidentalism,” or how the right and the left come to see the European cultural project itself.

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Sahlins’s “high-flying theory” does not only take the form of ideal-typical typologizing. One structure of Sahlins’s longue durée is his insistence on the logical rigour of his theories. Throughout his career Sahlins has insisted culture is “the ontological basis of the discipline: our object was culture and our study was cultures: their natures as discovered ethnographically, comparatively and historically” (2009a). Although few have noticed, Sahlins has undertaken a truly four-field anthropology to produce a logically coherent account of culture. Although a cultural anthropologist, he has not shirked from examining the biological nature of human beings, whether it be their similarities to primates (1958), or the physiology of their perception of colour (1976a), or the evolutionary origins of intersubjectivity (2011c). True, he has redrawn the arrows between culture, individuals, and the environment over the course of his career. But this is a sign of constancy not fickleness: he has consistently interrogated the adequacy of the ideas he has inherited and abandoned inconsistent positions. When these ideas have not been logically adequate he has altered them, as for instance when he forged a logically consistent account of sui generis culture out of White’s paradoxical commitment to the autonomy of culture and the determining power of the environment. This more purely theoretical turn can be seen in the contributions by Webb Keane and Joel Robbins. In his chapter, Keane rethinks the categories of “material” and “meaning” altogether. Popular accounts of Sahlins’s switch from “materialism” to “idealism” take for granted the idea that these two realms are distinct and incompatible – and that culture must be shaped by one or the other. In reality, Sahlins did not switch allegiance from the “material” to the “ideal.” Rather, he sought to move beyond a world view in which they were opposed. Keane develops this position by engaging with archaeology. Taking as his project the famous – and enigmatic – archaeological site at Çatalhöyük, Keane’s goal is to create a “materialist semiotic” to make sense of a neolithic material culture for which we have no historical scaffolding. Keane takes issue with archaeology’s tendency to divide the world into physical, utilitarian, and deterministic phenomena, on the one hand, and symbolic, immaterial, and free-willed, on the other. Keane demonstrates that opposing the material to the symbolic fails to illuminate ethnographic materials. Rather, we must reunderstand material culture as meaningful culture. Finally, Joel Robbins’s essay presents the most sustained engagement with Sahlins’s work. In his close reading of Sahlins’s account



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of culture change, Robbins argues against contemporary disenchantment with “strong” accounts of culture such as Sahlins’s. People may make “discontinuity a project” and actively seek to change their culture, and indeed cultural structures may not perdure for long periods of time. Nevertheless, Robbins argues, none of these facts successfully indicts an account of the causal force of culture in culture change. Robbins thus offers at a theoretical level what the other contributors have offered ethnographically: a defence of a rich, humanistic anthropology. This, then, is Marshall Sahlins’s practice of anthropology – a rigorous, humanistic study of cultural forms that is dedicated to the specific, but also cautiously generalizes: an anthropology that has undergone transformations while retaining its basic shape, is rooted in a four-field tradition, reaches out to a broader audience, and is morally engaged. We expect more writing from Marshall Sahlins in the future, and we believe that the essays here demonstrate that his practice of anthropology will continue in the work of his colleagues, maintaining continuity even as it transforms over time. As Sahlins’s inversion of the old saying goes: Plus la même chose, plus ça change.

Notes 1 In addition to the works cited in this introduction, the authors have drawn on a CV provided by Marshall Sahlins, as well as their own conversations with him over the years, to supply the dates and personal details mentioned here. We thank Marshall Sahlins for reading a version of this manuscript and suggesting changes and corrections. We were, unfortunately, unable to add all of the “original lines” he sent us for inclusion in this essay. All errors and omissions are our own.

1 How Long Is a Longue Durée? Structure, Duration, and the Cultural Analysis of Cultural Change Joel Robbins The drawing together of history and anthropology has been one of the major stories in the development of anthropological thought over the last forty years. It is a story in which Marshall Sahlins has played a central role, and the making of a marriage between these two disciplines has clearly been close to his heart: the words “history” or “historical” have appeared in the titles of five of his books since 1981. To the conjunction of history and anthropology he has done so much to effect, Sahlins has brought a robust notion of cultural structures, and he has shown how such structures give distinctive histories their shape even as in doing so they sometimes open themselves up to the impress of individual designs or empirical situations that exceed their own terms, thereby finding themselves transformed in the course of the very processes that reproduce them. The most general of the structures Sahlins treats as factors in historical process are those that from the point of view of the cultures to which they give form can be understood as structures of the longue durée – cosmologies, systems of kinship and alliance, folk notions of human nature, and the like. They are the enduring conceptions of the world and its workings that make a culture, and by extension its history, unique. Sahlins’s account of how such structures lend order to history have been influential not only in anthropology, but in history as well. Taking as given the importance of Sahlins’s contributions to the dialogue between anthropology and history, this essay asks how we might read his work differently if we were to regard him not only as



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someone who has enriched our conception of history, but also as the foremost contemporary anthropological theorist of cultural change. At first glance, this move from reading Sahlins’s work under the sign of history to reading it under the sign of cultural change might not appear to be a big enough shift in perspective to be meaningful. After all, history as a discipline is marked by an almost obsessive interest in change (Bennett 1997, Patterson 2004). As Gerschenkron (1968: 12) puts it, “the historian – at the peril of losing his subject – must be interested in historical change, that is to say, in the rates of change that lie between zero and infinity.” Following him, we might say that for historians stability is just a zero degree of change, where change is taken as the normal state of affairs. For cultural anthropologists, I have suggested elsewhere, it is generally possible to reverse Gerschenkron’s observation – at the peril of losing their object, they must be interested in cultural continuity, that is to say, in rates of continuity that lie between zero and infinity (Robbins 2007). Four decades of cross-fertilization between anthropology and history, and various popular critiques of the culture concept during the same period, have somewhat muddied this picture. But it probably still remains valid to say that for most anthropologists, whether they articulate this as a principle or not, cultural change is a zero degree of cultural reproduction, where continuity is taken as the normal state of affairs. It is this long-standing alignment of history with change and anthropology with continuity that makes the shift from reading Sahlins as a theorist of anthropological history to reading him as a theorist of cultural change seem too slight to produce interesting results: if history is about change, then anthropological theorizations of historical process will by their very nature be theorizations of cultural change as well. Yet in spite of the fact that it might appear to be just a slight shuffle of the feet, I want to argue that making this shift in perspective can open up different questions for our reading of Sahlins and provide for them new answers. Furthermore, the shift is worth making if for no other reason than that the battle to interest anthropologists in history has already been won, while that is not true of the battle to interest them in developing explicit models of cultural change. Most anthropologists today see the value in taking an historical approach to at least some of the questions they ask of their material, and there exists no theoretical camp that resolutely opposes this view. By contrast, few anthropologists have shown much interest in developing theories of cultural change. To be sure, they have rushed to study

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phenomena like globalization, modernization, and development that presume that cultural change is possible, and they have developed a number of descriptive categories in which to place changed cultures (e.g., hybrid, syncretic, and creolized), but their concern with such matters has not been matched by a sustained effort to theorize the various ways cultures come to fit these categories by undergoing processes of change. It is against this background that Sahlins has to be understood as someone who has made a number of major contributions to the study of cultural change. In the most general terms, we can say that what makes Sahlins distinctive among those who theorize change in any discipline is that he has wanted to maintain a strong theory of culture – a theory in which culture guides perception and profoundly if not exhaustively shapes action – even as he insists that such a theory must be able to account for the reality of change. In this respect, he can be characterized, as Sewell (2005: 199) has it, “as a structuralist of the Lévi-Straussian school who is trying to create a theory of cultural change without abandoning his structuralism.” Or, as Sahlins (1981a: 6) himself has put it, he has wanted to show that “the sacrifices apparently attending structural analysis – history, event, action, the world – are not truly required.” In working to square the structuralist circle of cultural reproduction so that it can allow for change, Sahlins has focused on developing new conceptualizations of practice and of the event. The major strain of his theory of practice is so well known as to require little discussion here. In his model, actors risk the cultural categories that shape their perception of the world by putting them to use in structures of the conjuncture that are always in principle capable of exceeding the expectations of those categories and thereby modifying them (see Sahlins 1985a). A less-known strain, which he argues for most extensively in Apologies to Thucydides (2004a), points to the necessity of delineating the kinds of structural situations in which people are culturally authorized to institute change through their practice – situations in which change is not wholly contingent, but is rather the structurally expected or prepared bringing to bear of personal and situational contingencies on the course of a culture’s movement through time (Sahlins 2004). In Sahlins’s terms, when practice does result in cultural change either because the world does not fit the cultural categories actors



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bring to bear on it or because structures have aligned in such a way as to open themselves to change, the actions by which change occurs constitute an event. This is tautologically true, as events are defined in terms of change: they are “a subclass” of human actions, “consisting of those … that change the order of things [i.e., structures]” (Sahlins 1991b: 46). Given this, one of the greatest tasks that has confronted Sahlins in his attempt to maintain a strong theory of culture while also theorizing cultural change has been the need to find a way of accounting for events that allows them to be in important (though not all) respects an expression of the very structures they transform. This is where his theory of practice, and particularly his notion of the structure of the conjuncture, comes to bear most strongly on his theory of change. For it is in the structure of the conjuncture that cultural structures, by means of human practice that is guided by them, reach down into the world to shape events while at the same time those events reach up into the structures that helped produce them and tinker with their organization. Although Sahlins’s understanding of the relationship between structure and event provides the basis for a novel conceptualization of cultural change, it is also the case that the opposition between these two terms has long defined the relationship between history and anthropology (Sahlins 1991b, Sewell 2005). By drawing us back to that relationship, discussions that unfold in terms of the opposition structure and event are likely to divert our attention from issues of cultural change per se, and fix it rather on that set of concerns that is proper to working out the relationship between those two disciplines, for example, issues of contingency, of the importance (or lack thereof) of the individual, and, as I will argue in a moment, of the event itself. In what follows, I want to replace the structure/ event binary with a slightly different one composed of the terms continuity and discontinuity. My hope is that this opposition will focus our attention more squarely on questions of how cultures change. In what follows, I take both continuity and discontinuity to apply to cultural structures, and neither of them presupposes a notion of the event at all. This is useful in that it prevents us from assuming that all change is “eventful” – that is, that it happens as the result of a discrete, time-bound set of actions. It helps us avoid the view that, as Sahlins (1991b: 78) puts it, change only happens as a result of “a brief present” that becomes “the resolution of a long past.” Instead

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of defining change by the events that cause it, I want to define it simply as cultural discontinuity – and to see what kinds of new avenues of exploration this redefinition might open up. Once the conceptual move from event to discontinuity is made, one returns unavoidably, and perhaps even more troublesomely, to the problem of how to hold on to a strong model of culture and still talk about change. For if cultural structures are subject to discontinuity, does it make sense to talk about them as cultural structures in the first place? On the assumption that culture is defined by continuity – it is traditional, inherited, and enduring – contemporary anthropologists who cannot turn away from the reality of cultural change in the world they confront are wont to drop the notion of culture altogether, adopting a nominalist attitude and defining all of life as a flux of constant change. The moment a culture changes, such arguments go, it ceases to be a culture and so culture cannot shape cultural change. Instead, we have to accept that the notion of culture is at best an analyst’s construction, and at worst a reification created by actors struggling to reach their own goals. Beyond this dismissive argument, even those who are willing to hold onto a strong notion of culture tend to imagine that, since cultures are oriented toward their own reproduction, cultural change must be caused by something other than culture. Hence, in arguments about cultural change, culture cannot have a central role to play. To counter these kinds of abandonment of the culture concept in the face of change, my first task will be to return to the same structuralist tradition that has nurtured Sahlins to argue that continuity in time is not a necessary feature of a cultural order. It is perfectly possible for humans to inhabit meaningful cultural orders that do not last very long, and that are no less meaningful orders for all that. Once this is done, I go on to consider models of transformation that treat culture as a primary force in steering processes of cultural change.

Synchrony Revisited Structuralism in anthropology has both drawn support from the discipline’s long-standing investment in seeing culture as enduring and lent theoretical sophistication to the way this investment came to be understood in the later part of the twentieth century. But in developing a structuralist theory of discontinuity, one has to question whether or not structuralist theory actually presupposes cultural



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continuity in its foundations or if it is only by accident, as it were, it came to be associated with a kind of continuity thinking that was in the air for other reasons at the time of its ascension. One interesting way to sort out this question on the side of the general cultural currents that left their mark on structuralism would be by way of a close reading of Triste Tropiques and other of Lévi-Strauss’s works in which he mourns the passing of cultural difference. But for the kind of argument I want to make here, it makes more sense to start on the side of the intellectual foundations of structuralist thought, querying the extent to which they define continuity as a necessary feature of meaningful orders. In this spirit, I turn to Saussure’s discussion of synchrony. In its imagery of time suppressed, this discussion would seem to argue for the long-lasting quality of linguistic structures. Yet despite Saussure’s use of this imagery and the spell it once cast over structural anthropology, it is possible to argue that Saussure did not make or even imply a link between the reality or importance of any given system of langue and its ability to endure through time. Saussure (1966: 80) begins his discussion of synchronic and diachronic linguistics by arguing that they need to be distinguished because “language is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms.” Because it is the relations that determine the values of elements, and not their own history nor the history of their relations, it is necessary to separate out the diachronic study of historical changes in elements of the system (and the systemic changes such elemental changes can cause) from the study of the synchronic relations that give elements their values at any given moment. This point is clear enough, but once it is made, Saussure’s argument quickly becomes confusing. In some places, Saussure seems to argue that a synchronic linguistic state is an analytic construction that the linguist posits for methodological reasons (Thibault 1997: 81; cf. Sewell 2005: 182). Such an argument can be inferred, for example, from the claim that one needs to take a synchronic approach to language because “the multiplicity of signs [in any language] … makes it absolutely impossible to study simultaneously relations in time and relations within the system” (Saussure 1966: 81). At other points, however, Saussure suggests that languages only effectively exist for users as synchronic systems, and that this is why it is important to study them synchronically: hence the key statement that “the synchronic viewpoint predominates, for it is the true and only reality to the community of speakers” (190) and the allied claim that “time does not exist

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insofar as the speaker is concerned. He is confronted with a state” (181). From the point of view of speakers, this second argument has it, it is diachrony that is an analytic notion – an intellectually motivated bringing together of elements that do not in reality condition one another’s value or shape people’s language use in the present. I bring up the coexistence of these two lines of argument in Saussure because accepting one or the other leads to very different understandings of the importance of synchrony to structural analysis. If synchrony is an analytic fiction, if as Saussure (1966: 81) somewhat unfortunately puts it, using the imagery I mentioned above, analysts get to synchrony only by “completely suppressing the past,” then the charge that structuralists routinely do analytic violence to languages and cultural worlds that in reality are in constant motion is difficult to refute. But if, on the other hand, human beings construe the world in terms of synchronic systems of linguistic and cultural categories – if history is something those who study living human beings produce only by expanding on the reality in which those beings live, rather than by observing an existing phenomenon – then there is no act of violence for which they have to answer when they carry out a synchronic analysis. Analysts have, on this understanding, no choice but to analyze languages and cultures synchronically if they want to know how languages and cultures work for those who use them. Having drawn from Saussure this argument for the reality of synchrony, I want to go one step further and notice an issue that he does not take up as relevant to his model of the speaker confronting the synchronic system. Nowhere does Saussure focus sustained attention on the question of how long a particular synchronic system has to endure in order to make meaning. Saussure’s discussion of the mechanics of language is free of any but passing references to enduring traditions, “Indigenous” inheritances, etc. Not only does his fledgling science not seem to need such notions (unlike an anthropology that would found itself on studying the “authentic” cultures of others), but the very reality of synchrony as a key feature of effective semiotic systems renders them irrelevant.1 We might add to Saussure’s claim about speakers confronting a synchronic system the notion that a speaker’s recipients must share the system to make much of what is said, and so a system needs to last at least long enough for the speaking “circuit” to run its course (Saussure 1966: 10–11), and we can also take on board his observation that given the length of time it takes individuals to learn a language, wholesale



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changes of an instantaneous nature would be impossible (72). But even with these assumptions about continuity in place, it is clear that in Saussure’s model of semiotic orders, a given language or cultural order does not have to last very long in its specifics to be able to carry out its function of allowing people to live meaningfully in the world. And I would further argue that none of the structuralists who followed Saussure have made a principled or explicit argument that counters this point. In laying out what I take to be Saussure’s argument for the reality of synchrony, my goal has been to reach a point where it is possible to suggest that the existence of discontinuities in culture should not lead us to question the value of cultural analysis – cultures can change from one synchronic moment to the next without ceasing to function as cultures for those who live with them for those moments. Culler (2007: 9–10) captures well what I am trying to establish: The term formalism has become something of a pejorative epithet in our era of historicisms, but formalism does not involve a denial of history, as is sometimes claimed. What it rejects is historical interpretation that makes the work a symptom, whose causes are to be found in historical reality. The Saussurian model can clarify this issue: it is precisely because language is historical through and through, always changing, that the distinction between synchronic and diachronic analysis is necessary, that we must relate any linguistic event to the synchronic system from which it emerges. If language were not so radically historical, we would have less need of the distinction. But what might appear to be a particular form or even sign is not the same in two different stages of the language, because what it is depends on what surrounds it. Although it is possible to read this passage as an assertion of the methodological importance of synchronic analysis, it is clear that by the end it is in keeping with my argument that in the structuralist sense synchrony is an ontological characteristic of meaningful orders. As analysts, we lose touch with the real existence of synchronic systems in human lives at our peril; indeed, Culler suggests, at the peril of our ability to understand history and change correctly. We are compromised in those efforts by failing to understand the ways such synchronic systems are always in force when people act, even if those actions lead to change.

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I hope to have come out of this discussion of synchrony with two claims firmly in place. The first is that cultural structures do not need to last for a long time in order to powerfully shape the way people live in the world. They can and perhaps often do last a long time, but cultural analysis is equally appropriate even in situations in which they do not. People who act effectively in the world at any level always act on the basis of a cultural system that is in place at least for the length of the moment in which they act, and to understand their action meaningfully it is that system we need discover. The second claim, a corollary of the first, is that cultural structures shape even those actions by which people intentionally or otherwise change the world and that, given this, to understand cultural change we need to understand the cultural structures that shape the actions that produce it. Once these two claims are made, the question then becomes that of how we can develop models of change as discontinuity in a way that gives cultural structures understood in the strong, synchronic sense, their full due as causes of such transformation. This is the question that guides the rest of this essay. One way to put what I am after in the development of models of change that are built around strong conceptions of culture is to say that I am looking for models of change that do not assume that people are ever outside of culture during processes of cultural transformation. Even theorists of change who are sympathetic to strong notions of culture often assume that change must in one way or another have extra-cultural causes. Sewell (2005), for example, provides a spirited defence of the value of synchronic analysis for those who want to study change: Unless we can represent to ourselves and our readers the form of life in one historical moment or era, unless we can describe systematically the interlocking meanings and practices that give it a particular character, how are we to explain its transformation – or, for that matter, even to recognize when and how it has been transformed … No account of change will be judged deep, satisfying, rich, or persuasive unless it is based on a prior analysis of synchronic relations.” (184–5, original emphasis) Yet when it comes to explaining change, Sewell turns to the individual variability of human beings, who are bound to understand the elements of a common culture in different ways (2005: 192–3).



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Elsewhere, in his important discussion of the development of the idea of “revolution” as justified popular violence in the service of political change, Sewell again posits the importance of an acultural source of change – this time in the form of liminal moments produced by structural dislocations that render culture momentarily less effective in shaping perception and action and allow for individual and group creativity (250–1, 254). In each of these explanations, the move from one synchronic state to another is caused by some action that is not motivated by either the old or the new culture: the practical energy needed to effect cultural discontinuity has to be drawn, it seems, from some source other than either the old or new culture and their usual motivating schemes. It must, that is, be mined from individuals and the dynamics of their private understandings, or from the general experience of cultural breakdown and the possibilities of creativity such breakdown allows.2 I have chosen to consider Sewell as an example here because of his sophistication as a cultural theorist. Many others could be found who adhere to some version of a structure/breakdown/new structure model of change. And the list of those who count on individual variation to generate change in culture is virtually endless. But Sewell is a superb reader of Sahlins and other cultural anthropologists, and I generally find his work to be some of the most valuable produced on the topic of cultural change. Unlike many who think culture is a useless or very limited idea and focus on what they take to be the obvious force of some real beyond culture (e.g., human nature, laws of development, the power of pain and trauma in shaping human life) in explaining social processes, Sewell works diligently to keep a strong model of culture in play in his accounts of historical change. His difficulties in offering a fully cultural account of cultural change, then, serve not to point up his own weaknesses, but rather to indicate how hard it is to construct such an account. In the remainder of this essay, I want to argue that Marshall Sahlins has offered us tools for doing so, and to expand on what he has offered us in a number of ways.

On Cultural Causes of Cultural Change A fully cultural account of cultural change would be one in which the analyst is able to explain the occurrence of discontinuities in cultural content without recourse to arguments about discontinuities in cultural process. That is to say, one would explain changing cultural

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categories and values without having to argue that at some moment in the process of change people’s action stopped being guided in important respects by culture. Sahlins’s best-known theory of cultural change, in which people’s actions are shaped by their cultural categories, which are then subject to change when the world does not fit them, satisfies these conditions well, and I take it as a baseline understanding of culturally conditioned cultural change.3 In work that followed Islands of History, Sahlins proffered some new models of change as a cultural process. He developed the most important of these models in the course of addressing a difficulty with the baseline theory as he had elaborated it in Islands of History. This difficulty follows from the fact that in the Hawaiian case he discussed extensively in that book, the driving force for change was the arrival on the scene of people from elsewhere whose lives were guided by a different cultural order. It was the ensuing clash of people whose actions were framed by different cultures that rendered the world recalcitrant to Hawaiian cultural categories. Sahlins’s account along these lines succeeded in explaining Hawaiian cultural change in terms of cultural process, but it left many readers asking if such explanations would also hold in the absence of an outside stimulus as powerful as the one that threw the world to which Hawaiian actions referred out of synch with the categories by which they did so: how, readers were asking, would a culture change in the absence of something coming to it from the outside? In a paper that introduces the most important of his more recent models of change, Sahlins (1991b: 45) responds to such a question by tackling the issue of what he calls “endogenous” or “internally generated events.” In laying out the causes of such events, Sahlins places the idea of actors risking categories by applying them to the world somewhat in the background, and develops a set of new models for exploring the ways cultural processes can lead to cultural change. One such model understands cultural change as the outcome of the operation of complementary schismogenesis between groups of people who share a general cultural framework. Sahlins borrows the notion of complementary schismogenesis from Bateson, and defines it as a “competition by contradictions, in which each side organizes itself as the inverse of the other” (Sahlins 2004a: 69). In putting schismogenesis to work in explaining historical process, Sahlins sees it as leading groups that begin by sharing a cultural background to progressively differentiate themselves from one another in ways



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that lead to cultural change. His key examples of the outcome of this process are the differences in internal organization that held between the Fijian states of Rewa and Bau on the eve of the great war between them, and the contrasts that held between Athens and Sparta at the time of the Peloponnesian Wars (ibid.). This model of transformation borrows little from the idea that what causes change is a lack of fit between the categories people apply in action and the world to which they apply them. But it maintains an emphasis on the idea that people create change by acting on the basis of culturally shaped understandings of the world. In cases of complementary schismogenesis, it is the culturally shaped understandings people possess about themselves and others that leads them to modify their own culture in relation to a negative example. Hence, the changes people make in the course of this process are based on actions explicable in cultural terms. A second model that appears in Sahlins’s later work aims to uncover the structural conditions that allow particular situations and the actions of individuals who take part in them to affect major cultural changes. Sahlins (1991b, 2004a, 2005e) discusses the structural mechanisms at work in cases where such change is possible as ones in which situations, by means of a series of cultural “relays,” become aligned with standing complexes of cultural ideas – thus allowing the resolution of the situations to modify the complexes of ideas to which they are linked. The examples he offers to illustrate this dynamic include among others the chiefly politics surrounding the war between Bau and Rewa in Fiji and the structural conditions that for a season allowed Elián González and the members of his family to become a preoccupation in US political debate around the turn of the millennium. What these and his other examples have in common is that all of them involve cases in which, first, existing cultural tensions are in play. For example, tensions between the political and kinship orders in Fiji, particularly as they oppose sovereignty of the chief to his relative powerlessness in the face of his sister’s sons – a tension heightened just before the onset of the Bau-Rewa war by the growing power of Bau. Or, in the Elián González case, the tension that marks the sanctity of the family in US culture when considered alongside its ultimate subordination to the market and the state. A second commonality between these cases is that they are ones in which the cultural tensions in question find themselves exemplified in specific situations in which the public takes an active

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interest in their workings out through the actions of those most closely involved in them. The resulting interlocking of macrohistories and microhistories, as Sahlins (2005e) puts it, allows a culture to change in the course of events in which people act in important respects on the basis of categories the culture itself supplies. To this point, Sahlins’s discussion of changes brought about by macro-micro relays is one in which cultural change is explained in wholly cultural terms. Yet in a further turn of Sahlins’s argument, matters become more complicated in this regard. Instances in which broader cultural tensions gear into specific situations, Sahlins (1991b: 63) argues, can turn persons into “social-historical individuals,” able to “embody a larger social order” they are then authorized to transform. Although their position as social-historical individuals is culturally prepared (either “systemically” or “conjuncturally,” a contrast I will not elaborate here – see Sahlins 2004a: 155), the fact that they occupy it does not erase their individuality. Rather, it creates a context in which their individuality can be brought to bear on cultural process in an unusually direct way. Sahlins discusses this in a remarkable passage that is unusual in his oeuvre and deserves to be quoted at some length. In this passage, he writes in terms of structure and event, and uses a terminology developed to elucidate his model of the way structural relays produce cultural change. This terminology includes “instantiation” (in which cultural categories become represented by “particular persons, objects, and acts”), “denouement” (the incident in which the categories are put into relation in actions), and “totalization” (when the consequences of the event are reabsorbed by a culture that changes in order to accommodate them) (Sahlins 1991b: 81–2). With this background in place, here is the passage I want to focus on: What makes the event is a dynamics of the incident that alters the larger relations figuring there – that is, in the persons of the social-historical actors and their social-historical doings. And what makes the alterations of the larger relations is the fact that in this lower-order incident, all kinds of considerations apart from the larger forces these actors instantiate, other forces of which they may be unaware, motivate them. Other beings and objects, with their own projects or causes and their own modes of action, affect them. Thus the famous “contingencies” of the event, with the effect of an “aleatory transition from one



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structure to another” (Le Roy Ladurie 1979: 114). These other series, however, are not in themselves contingent. They are only so in relation to the object of historical study; in themselves, they may be quite systematic. Here is a place, then, for psychohistory. For if by instantiation the totality devolves upon the person, and in the denouement the destiny of the first is submitted to the activity of the second, then society is decided by biography and – Durkheim and White forgive us – culture by psychology. (83) This turn in Sahlins’s argument is a challenge to the way I have been reading him to this point. Rather than a claim that culture exhaustively accounts for cultural change, it gives individual idiosyncrasies a key explanatory role. Are we then thrown back on the kinds of acultural models of change that assume that between any two different states of a culture there must exist a moment when something other than culture guides action and hence brings about the differences between them? Although it is difficult to fully quell the suspicion that Sahlins has in fact returned us to that common kind of model here (I cannot, in any case, fully argue against this claim on my reading of the text), I want to dwell for a moment on aspects of his account that at least render it much more indebted to cultural explanation than many other accounts that give acultural factors a role to play in processes of cultural change. An efficient way to bring out the aspects of Sahlins’s model that I want to foreground is to contrast it with the two explanatory schemes I drew from Sewell’s work in the previous section. Both of those schemes laid the causes of change at the feet of individuals acting on extra-cultural impulses, either private interpretations of cultural materials or creative ideas they develop in situations in which cultural structures have broken down. The way Sahlins’s model differs from both of these is that it insists that individual idiosyncrasies only gain a foothold on cultural process in situations that have themselves been culturally prepared for them to do so. In his model, individuals are not routinely able to bring their private understandings or culturally non-standard motivations to bear on cultural change. They can act in terms of them, of course, but the well-understood mechanisms, Durkheimian and otherwise, by which deviant acts are either put out of play or are put in service of reproduction usually prevent them from ringing cultural changes. Yet even as people’s personal particularities usually do not for these reasons register on

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culture, it is also not the case that culture has to cease to function, has to experience some sort of general breakdown, for them to be able to do so. Instead, what has to happen is that cultural categories have to settle on specific situations that can be made to mirror their structure so explicitly, so self-consciously, that the actors involved are able to bring their private projects to bear not only on the attainment of their own goals, but on the modification of the categories in question. What is distinct about this model among others that give individuality a role in change is that culture never stops being in play – the role of culture is never passive. Culture may not be sufficient to produce change on its own, but culture is necessary, and it thoroughly structures the very contexts in which individual idiosyncrasies work upon it. Fijian culture never stopped operating throughout the history of the Bau-Rewa war, nor did US culture cease to structure the events around Elián González. Instead, culture continued to operate even through the period in which it changed. In this respect, Sahlins’s model of macro-micro relays, despite the place it affords individual idiosyncrasies in the course of cultural change, is not one that has to resort to the discontinuities in cultural process in order to explain discontinuities in cultural content. With this conclusion in mind, it perhaps makes sense to distinguish not between models of cultural change that explain it in cultural terms and those that explain it aculturally, but rather between those that assume that culture plays a role throughout processes of change, even as the role it plays may sometimes make room for acultural factors to contribute as well, and those that assume that culture must at some point stop operating to guide behaviour if cultural change is to occur. Sahlins’s account of the process of structural relays would be an example of the former type. Such accounts have the virtue of lending no support to those who want to diminish radically the role that culture plays in social life, even as they are not naive about the roles other factors can sometimes play as well.

Discontinuity as Cultural Project Before concluding, I want to elucidate two more cultural models of cultural change that can be constructed on the basis of Sahlins’s work, though they each represent modifications of his own positions. These two models are linked inasmuch as both of them, like



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the model of complementary schismogenesis, concern complexes of cultural ideas that themselves push for cultural change and render projects of fostering cultural discontinuity collective preoccupations in the societies in which they hold sway. The first model I want to consider in this connection is one that aims to account for the emergence of cultural complexes that promote the rejection of standing cultural ideas and their replacement with new ones. The question this model seeks to answer is, how do cultures become explicitly discontinuity producing?4 Sahlins has provided an answer to this question in some of his writings that are not well known by comparison with the bulk of his work. The answer he has given is that cultures become explicitly discontinuity oriented only when those who act in terms of them are humiliated by some outside force such as colonization or Christian missionization that teaches them “to hate what they already have, what they have always considered their well-being” in such a way that they come to “despise what they are, to hold their own existence in contempt – and want, then, to be someone else” (Sahlins 1992a: 24). It is the experience of such humiliation that leads people to self-consciously reject the (often unself-conscious) project of reproducing their culture, and to develop a culture organized around the value of producing a new way of being that is discontinuous with that of the past. I have written at length elsewhere about Sahlins’s model of humiliation as a factor in cultural change and the way it fits with his better-known work on the topic (Robbins 2005; see also the other contributions to Robbins and Wardlow 2005). Rather than review the details of that discussion here, I want only to lay out one modification of the humiliation model that is necessary if it is to be included in that class of models that explain cultural change in cultural terms, without positing breaks in cultural process. This modification has to do with how we construe people’s understanding of the humiliation that moves them to develop cultural valuations of radical change. There is no shortage of discourses in the world that can lead people to interpret their own lives in humiliating terms. Sahlins, we have seen, offers colonial discourses and Christian conversionist ones as key members of this class, and to these we also can add developmentalist schemes and the language of marginality and temporal “behindness” they so often carry with them. Furthermore, there is, we are often told, the humiliation produced by the simple

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demonstration effect of superior technology and overwhelming power, or, nowadays, of the glamorous lives that other people are seen to live on television and in movies. The fact that these discourses and images are often encountered by people living in situations of considerable threat, violence, or material and social insecurity only increases their ability to lead people to condemn their own ways of life. From the point of view of cultural analysis of cultural change, these popular explanations for the advent of humiliation in people’s lives leave out a crucial cultural step. In order for people to grasp their humiliation in terms of discourses and images that come to them from outside of their own cultural frames, as these explanations suggest that they do, they would already have had to embrace those discourses and images in the very terms those discourses and images lay down: that is, they would already have had to experience significant cultural change. To see oneself as a sinner, one already has to know important parts of Christian doctrine, and to see oneself as undeveloped one already has to have a coherent (even if not accurate) sense of the benefits development can bring. If this is the case, then humiliation can only come after cultural change has taken place, and therefore cannot explain it. If we are to preserve humiliation as a cultural cause of cultural change, then, we need to modify our account by arguing that people first understand their humiliation in standing (or “traditional”) cultural terms, and that it is this traditionally framed experience of humiliation that leads them to actively engage humiliating foreign discourses that both deepen their sense of dissatisfaction and provide ideational materials for cultural reconstructions designed to overcome it. A brief example might be useful to illustrate the process of change I am describing.5 The Urapmin of Papua New Guinea are a group of approximately 390 people living in the Western Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. They were first significantly contacted in the late 1940s, and Baptist missionaries were active in their region by the early 1960s. Yet the Urapmin were too remote and small a group to be of much interest to the Baptist mission, and thus they were never directly missionized by Westerners. In the mid-1960s, however, community and family leaders began of their own accord to send some of the children of the community to study with missionaries working among other groups in their region. Many of the young people sent to study with the mission converted and began to work for the mission as paid evangelists to more remote



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groups. During the period in which they did so, few of the older Urapmin who had stayed at home adopted the new religion, though they remained open to learning about it from these younger members of their community. This pattern held for a number of years, but in 1977 a charismatic revival movement swept through their region. It settled early in Urapmin, brought by some of the younger people who had picked it up at a regional Bible school they were attending. Upon its arrival, almost all members of the community felt themselves “kicked” by the Holy Spirit, an experience that convinced them both of God’s existence and of their own sinfulness. Within the course of the ensuing year, everyone in Urapmin converted to charismatic Christianity. As they did so, they worked together as a community to dismantle their traditional religion (tearing down its temples, discarding the ancestral bones that were its primary focus, and burning the magic objects that were crucial to private engagements with the cosmos as traditionally understood). Ever since the time of the revival, the Urapmin have also worked together to establish a new set of cultural understandings among themselves: understandings about everything from what human nature consists of, to how people should treat one another, to how the cosmos is organized. At the same time, they have laboured to eradicate every vestige of active engagement with or interpretation of the world in terms of their traditional religious ideas. They talk constantly in public about the need to stick to their new understandings and to be done with those of the past. Why did the Urapmin embark on such a rapid, self-directed course of cultural change? The answer has to do with the way changes in the cultures around them – especially in those whose members had closer contact with missionaries and colonial personnel – dislocated the Urapmin from the central position they had once occupied in a hierarchical regional ritual system that was one of the most prominent features of traditional life in the region. Premised on a division of ritual labour grounded in an unequal distribution of important ancestral bones and secret ritual knowledge, this ritual system united a large number of societies in a single religious complex. Within this complex, the Urapmin understood themselves to be paramount, or, at worst, to share paramountcy with one of their closest neighbours and allies. This understanding was a crucial feature of their sense of where they fit in the world. With the emergence of the colonial order, and the spread of mission stations that took off under its aegis, regional organization

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shifted its grounding. Groups with greater access to the government began to base their claims to regional importance on grounds other than religious ones, and many in those groups opted out of the regional system altogether by converting to Christianity. As these changes transpired, the Urapmin found themselves shifted out of the centre of their own world. No longer a major power in religious matters that concerned everyone, they were becoming a marginal group whose members had little to show for themselves in the revised hierarchies of value by which life was coming to be judged in their region. It was this shift that produced the humiliation that drove the Urapmin to seek change, and it was a humiliation they understood in traditional cultural terms that defined people’s worth by their role in regional relations and defined these relations primarily in religious terms. The fact that the humiliation the Urapmin felt was defined as religious/cosmological in substance helps explain why the Urapmin looked to Christianity as a way to address it, for Christianity offered them a new religious system, and one in which their physical location did not ensure their marginality (Robbins 2006). But what is crucial to recognize here is that their initial experience of humiliation was one that made sense to them in traditional terms; it was this humiliation that drove them to look for a new way of understanding the world and their place in it. My more general argument is that humiliation must often, if not always, work this way. One must originally find the motive for change in traditional cultural understandings, or else one would already be occupying a new culture. I can introduce the last of the cultural models of cultural change I want to consider in this essay by staying with the Urapmin example and pointing out that once the Urapmin had adopted Christianity for reasons we can describe as making sense in traditional cultural terms, their new religion offered them a fresh set of humiliations that put in place a cultural emphasis on eradicating the culture of the past. Defining traditional cosmological figures as demonic, and condemning the practices by which one approached them as sinful, Urapmin Christianity urged the faithful to work consistently to put the past behind them. But it did more than simply attack the explicit figures and rituals of traditional religion. It also defined as sinful traditional ethical ideas and ways of organizing social life. To the extent that the Urapmin hold on to traditional ways of construing and acting in the world in these respects – and they do hold onto to some of them because their new religion gives them no alternative way to



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organize society, a point I cannot do justice to here (see Robbins 2004) – all of them remain constantly in struggle to surpass their traditional culture, and in much of what individuals say and do they present themselves as working toward change. We might, then, describe the current Urapmin situation as one in which people’s original humiliation and adoption of Christianity as a new cultural framework from which to address it has made them all socio-historical individuals; each Urapmin person has taken on the transformation of Urapmin culture as a project to which he or she can and must make a contribution. The image of a collection of Christians who see themselves as socio-historical individuals licensed to change their culture undoubtedly sounds all too Protestant (cf. Errington and Gewertz 1995). But I would contend that such cultural formations, ones that demand change and define all members of society as historical actors capable of carrying it out, appear in many places today, not all of them marked by Protestantism. Deeb’s work (2006) among pious Shi’i Muslims living in the southern suburbs of Beirut offers a fine example coming out of a different tradition. The Muslims she studies are intent on “modernizing” their religion on their own terms, creating a culture that is different from those of both their own “near past” and “the contemporary ‘West’” (19). Through a self-conscious process Deeb (20–2) labels “authentication,” they aim to replace their traditional Islamic understandings and practices with “true” ones. Like the Urapmin, they constitute a community in which individuals feel they have both an ability and a responsibility to change their culture. Deeb’s rich ethnography of the lives of these Lebanese Muslims demonstrates across many domains of social life the way the cultural impulse toward change that marks their view of the world results in a situation in which people experience “a disruption in the way they practice, understand, and talk about Islam” (2006: 22). Moreover, she is able to document with precision the kinds of cultural changes they make, showing in detail how a culturally defined interest in cultural change can lead to concrete transformations. One of her finest examples of this process is her account of the changes pious Muslims have made to the series of rites known as Ashura. The Ashura rites commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, a crucial event in the definition of Shi’ism. Traditional Ashura ceremonies, which Deeb (2006, chapter 4) describes in detail, focus on arousing emotion and fostering the salvation of the participants in the future. Authenticated Ashura rites, by contrast, are carried

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out in orderly, less emotional fashion, and stress the importance of revolutionary activism and social welfare work in the present. These major modifications in the meanings of the rites are carried by numerous changes in their details: the authenticated rites do away, for example, with practices of self-laceration, change the way in which key recitations are made, and shift the representations of Imam Husayn’s sister, Zeynab, from ones that dwell on her grief to ones that highlight her leadership of Husayn’s community in captivity and her role in training them for resistance. Authenticated Ashura rites also feature much greater participation by women. Deeb’s ethnography provides far more details on the authentification process as it remakes not only Ashura rites but many other traditional ideas and practices among those pious Muslims who are committed to it. Her work can be taken as a paradigmatic example of an approach to culturally driven cultural change that proceeds by ratifying many or all members of a society to act as agents of change. With so many people in the world now self-consciously engaged with their own cultures – some by way of preservation, others by way of rejection – this kind of cultural formation is one that anthropologists are more and more called upon to understand. By recognizing it as one in which a specific dynamic of cultural change is in play, it should be possible to compare cases fruitfully across regions and more generally push forward a strong program of studying cultural change in cultural terms.

Conclusion During the same period in which anthropology and history drew closer together, strong models of culture as the most important force in shaping people’s perception of and action in the world began to fall out of favour in the anthropological community. The reasons for culture’s fall are numerous, but perhaps this essay has revealed the identity of one of the less often noticed of the many hands that pushed it down. This would be the way in which history’s traditional interest in discontinuity and change presented a challenge to anthropology’s similarly long-standing analysis of authentic cultures as enduring in relatively unchanging forms. As anthropologists turned to history, many found themselves wanting to recognize the importance of change in human life. To the extent that relying on strong notions of culture appeared to make it impossible to realize



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that goal, they were prepared to drop those notions and retreat to individualist models of social process, or universal accounts of worldhistorical development, or what Sahlins (1999c) has called “powerism” or power functionalism, or a host of less distinct schemes in which theoretical positions were not terribly well defined but arguments about culture (rather than the “cultural”) were without question out of bounds. In this conjuncture of theoretical ambitions and perceived constraints, the work of Marshall Sahlins stands out as unique. Refusing to abandon a strong model of culture as a condition of entry into the arena of change, he has made major innovations in how culture is understood. In this essay I have engaged this facet of his work, laying out some aspects of it, amending others, and attempting through my discussion of synchrony to provide an explicit argument for why it is possible to develop models of discontinuity in cultural content that do not depend on discontinuities in cultural process. My claim is not that culture controls the flow of change in its entirety in all cases. But I would like to think that it is in keeping with the overall outlines of Sahlins’s influential body of work to suggest that anthropologists ought at least to be willing to push culture as far as it can go in explaining all facets of human life. In the case of cultural change, that project has only really just begun. I have argued in this essay that there is thus great value in reading Sahlins’s approach to anthropological history as having given us key theoretical tools for exploring the crucial role that culture plays in shaping cultural change.

Notes 1 Chapter III of Part One of Saussure’s (1966) book Course in General Linguistics contains Saussure’s primary discussion of synchrony as a theoretical notion. The chapter that immediately proceeds it (Chapter II , Part One) does contain some statements about language being traditional and inherited from the past that may appear to contradict my claim that Saussure has no need for ideas about enduring traditions and the like (Saussure 1966: 71–8). But a careful reading of Chapter II will show that in it Saussure does not make any claims about how long a language must last to count as a language, and in fact he concludes his discussion with the argument that although impervious to change guided by individual intention,

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languages are always changing. These are the themes that he picks up from this chapter in the chapter on synchrony, and he never has recourse to an argument that the only authentic languages are long-standing ones. Sewell (2005: 193–4) also offers a perspectival model of internal social variability in which people with different social vantage points on a culture are bound to see it differently and these differences can lead to change. This has the makings of a more fully cultural account of change, but as such perspectivalism is wielded in contemporary anthropology and social thought more broadly, it often devolves into a kind of Western common sense individualism that in practice gives culture very little role to play in shaping social life (cf. Sahlins 2004: 186–7). I argue elsewhere that what I am calling here the baseline model is more complex than many readers have taken it to be, and I trace out a number of the facets of Sahlins’s work on change up through Islands of History (published in 1985) (Robbins 2004: 6–15). Here I focus on the models of change Sahlins developed after the appearance of that book. I use the cumbersome phrase “discontinuity producing” rather than, say, “self-transforming” to mark that the kind of changes these cultures define as valuable are those that make a radical break with what has come before. They can be distinguished from (though they are often also related to) modernist cultural formations that value change as an enhancement of existing features they already define as their strengths (e.g., technological advancement, individual freedom understood as autonomy, etc.). This account draws on Robbins (2004), in which the argument I present here is fleshed out in much greater detail.

2 Monarchical Visions: Constructions of “Kingship” in Colonial Samoa Jocelyn Linnekin On 18 August 1885 the Samoan high chief Malietoa Laupepa wrote a letter to Queen Victoria (Figure 2.1).1 Addressing her as “Tupu Tamaitai,” the “Lady King” of Great Britain and Ireland, Laupepa endeavoured to clarify Samoan political custom for her. He would have her know that, according to the customary beliefs of Samoa from the earliest times, he – Malietoa Laupepa – was the “real King” (Tupu) of Samoa. Laupepa’s letter to Victoria was but one of many appeals by would-be Samoan kings to foreign powers and powerful resident foreigners. During the protracted “kingship dispute” of the late nineteenth century, Samoan chiefly rivals fought one another with genealogies and mythic history as well as with armies of followers. The climax of this complicated saga was a bizarre courtroom battle in which an American judge had the task of determining who would be the king of Samoa. This chapter examines European and Samoan understandings and invocations of “kingship” during the decades immediately prior to formal colonial takeover, a period when chiefs warred over questions of customary precedence and the islands’ government seemed for a time to change hands on a daily basis. Foreign diplomats and entrepreneurs called the situation “chaos” and found the disorder intolerable. Thus, from the 1860s until the Western partition of the archipelago in 1900, an assortment of foreign settlers, consuls, and adventurers tried by direct and indirect means to institute a lasting, centralized indigenous government in Samoa.

Figure. 2.1.  Laupepa’s letter to Queen Victoria.



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From the anti-colonial perspective, the Samoan kingship dispute could be cited to illustrate the destructive effects of Western contact on native societies. Such an analysis might conclude that indigenous politics are irrelevant and ineffectual in the face of the structural imperative of core-state expansion. This interpretation would not do justice to Samoan political history. In contradistinction to older paradigms of unidirectional “impacts” on indigenous societies, Marshall Sahlins (1981a, 1985a, 1995) has problematized the contact encounter as a complex interaction between cultural systems that are foreign to one another. In the “structure of the conjuncture” a mutual interpretation takes place, each side sizing up and situating the other within a cultural value system. Creative symbolic revaluation is ongoing, reciprocal, and mutually influential. Samoan political conflicts of the late nineteenth century aptly illustrate how, in contact settings, foreigners and indigenous people symbolically construct their own and each other’s conceptual models, and deploy those novel constructions to achieve culturally specific goals. For a number of reasons, Samoa came into the Western orbit relatively late in comparison with other Polynesian island groups (see Gilson 1970; Hanson 1973; Holmes 1980; Linnekin 1991a, 1991b). The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of intensifying commercial interest and political meddling by citizens of the “Great Powers” – Great Britain, Germany, and the United States.2 With home governments leery of the risks and expense of far-flung territorial acquisitions, none of these three nations was eager to annex Samoa formally. Yet each wanted to protect its citizens and commercial interests, and – perhaps most importantly – each feared the consequences of allowing the archipelago to fall to one of the other powers. Strictly speaking, the colonial era in Samoa did not begin until partition in1900, when Western Samoa became a German colony and the eastern islands were allocated to the administration of the United States Navy. I apply the term “colonial” to the late nineteenth century because, although the archipelago was not yet under foreign rule, Western imperial priorities and aspirations disproportionately framed chiefly contestation. Most foreigners viewed the model of kingship as a culturally appropriate solution to the perceived problem of chronic political disorder. In the European view, a monarchy held the promise of stable, authoritarian rule. For elite Samoans, the kingship represented a possibility seldom realized in the past, but now more achievable because of the presence of settler

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factions with arms to sell and, sometimes, with military assistance to lend to one chief or another. During this period “kingship” was a contested narrative field for both Samoans and foreigners. It would be inaccurate to characterize the kingship as a foreign political model imposed on an unwilling or unwitting people, nor did the Samoan chiefs’ pursuit of kingly status indicate the adoption of Western modes of rule. Chiefly contenders embraced the goal of centralized rule as they played out long-standing family and district rivalries. Samoan chiefs knew that there was myth-historical precedent for a single ruler over a unified country, and they enlisted the European model to further their own political ambitions. Resultant incarnations of the kingship were chronically short-lived. Instead of putting an end to factional conflict and instituting the stable government that Europeans wanted, “kingship” sedimented a not entirely new direction in Samoan political striving. The quest for a Samoan king illustrates a mutually influential interaction between foreign and Native constructions and goals – a process whereby both European and Samoan scenarios for political rule in the islands were reoriented.

Of Chiefs and Kings During the early contact period in Polynesia, Westerners were preoccupied with the centring project – the creation of, and putative cultural precedent for, a stable unified polity ruled from an administrative centre by a head of state. Foreign visitors to Samoa frequently complained about “the want of power amongst those who are called chiefs” and made invidious comparisons with island societies such as Hawai‘i, where chiefs gave orders and could expect them to be obeyed, much to the convenience of foreign commercial interests.3 The limits of Samoan chiefly authority were perceived as a hindrance to spiritual conquest as well as to orderly trade. As early as 1835 Methodist missionary Peter Turner drew an explicit contrast with the mission’s success in Tonga when he reported to his superiors: “There are difficulties … of which we knew nothing in the Tonga group, viz. the want of a head to govern, a king … the common people do as they please, and it seems optional whether they do the commands of their chiefs or not.”4 Conversion strategies that had worked well in Tonga seemed, in Samoa, only to incite more community divisions. The tactic of “making presents” to ingratiate chiefs, for example, tended to backfire



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in Samoa. Where Tongans tended to be “satisfied” with a chief’s decision to redistribute or not, Turner noted, Samoans were likely to show their displeasure by aligning with another chief or by affiliating with the rival Protestant group, the London Missionary Society (LMS): “If he be a cheif [sic] – he will separate & build his own chapel for himself & his relatives. The same religion will perhaps have 3 chapels when the whole town does not contain two hundred persons.”5 Thirty years later, when Samoa was receiving much more foreign traffic, British Captain Hope gave an address “to the chiefs of Samoa,” critiquing what he saw as the most objectionable features of their society and instructing them on the political model they should emulate. Noting that Hawai‘i, Tonga, and Rarotonga had all established unified governments, the sea captain advised them: “You have got your islands divided into many different districts each of which is quite independent of others … It would be good for Samoa too if she had one head over the whole group, but if that cannot be there could at all events be one head over each island … But it would be far better to have one head who might have a council of Chiefs to advise him.”6 The Western powers’ ambitions were not uniformly imperialistic in the sense of seeking to acquire territories abroad. Government policy and settlers’ opinions regarding the future of Samoa often diverged on the issue of formal annexation, with officials at home maintaining that colonial interests could be served just as effectively, and with much less risk and expense, by means of laissez-faire economic relationships and informal consular influence on the government. For such aspirations to be realized, however, “a government” must be in place to ensure safe trade, protect private property, and make good on diplomatic promises. Europeans looked to their own political models for the form of the hoped-for indigenous government, and most saw monarchy as the logical choice for Samoa. The monarchical model would presumably satisfy foreign settlers’ demands for effective local control and, moreover, accorded with Western assessments of the native people’s developmental state and political maturity – or, more accurately to their mind, immaturity. The prevailing rationale was that peoples living so recently in a state of barbarism could not be expected to govern themselves democratically. Moreover, monarchy was thought to be “‘naturally’ suited to Polynesians” (Gilson 1970: 188). Westerners not only construed the hierarchy of the Samoan chiefly matai system as a precedent for kingship, but equated the two institutions

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as homologous political forms and readily categorized indigenous chiefs as “kings” (cf. Hocart 1927). “Kingship” implies a bundle of political ideas – the ruler as societal exemplar, a monopoly of force, centralized administration, and the prima facie existence of a “nation.”7 These notions seem ill-suited to Samoa, where political authority was dispersed territorially among the chiefs of villages and districts as well as functionally within the local polity.8 Formal authority in Samoa is associated with chiefly (matai) titles, and no single title in itself conveys authority within a polity larger than a district. The Samoan village council (fono) of chiefs has historically claimed decision-making autonomy in local affairs. Chiefly titles are associated with villages and carry the authority to administer and allocate lands belonging to extended families (‘āiga). Matai “titled persons, chiefs” are fundamentally linked to the local level through kin ties, for they are first and foremost the heads and chosen representatives of families (Mead 1930: 18; Meleiseā 1987: 7–8; Shore 1982: 71–2). The ‘āiga elects the successor to the family title on the basis of past service (tautua) and ability rather than by a fixed rule of inheritance. The matai’s dignity is associated with the title rather than with the individual from birth (Mead 1930: 122; Meleiseā 1987: 8). There is no ethnohistorical evidence that Samoan chiefs were physically or ritually set apart from their people, although some ethnographers were told that personal taboos surrounded certain “sacred” chiefs “in the earliest period” (Kramer 1942 [1902]: 17; cf. Mead 1930: 180–1). Despite the elaborate punctilios and oratorical obsequies paid to Samoan chiefs, the matai’s authority in most cases extended little beyond the family.9 Importantly, however, the highest titles have carried the potential for wider political reach since mythic times. Samoan political authority is further problematized by the functional and behavioural complementarity between two types of chiefs, ali‘i (high chiefs) and tulāfale (talking chiefs or orators). The distinction grounds a systemic tension in the distribution of power, in that “chiefs” are accorded greater ceremonial respect but “orators” have the political-economic edge. The high chief “is supposed never to injure his dignity by speaking for himself,” the British consul remarked in the 1880s (Churchward 1971: 25).10 It is the job of orators to speak for the chiefs in public meetings and officiate at ceremonial distributions, for which services they are customarily paid in cultural valuables – fine mats (‘ie toga) and tapa cloth



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(siapo). The norms of exchange give tulāfale the material advantage (Kramer 1942 [1902]: 51; Mead 1930: 77; Shore 1982: 245; Williams 1832 in Moyle 1984: 250); historically, the political import of the ceremonial goods meant that orators enjoyed considerable leverage over chiefs in such matters as the bestowal of high titles, marriages, and regional alliances (Linnekin 1991c). Perhaps most importantly for the present discussion, talking chiefs preside over, witness, and legitimate the bestowal of titles at every level. Although the ali‘i are higher in ceremonial rank, the orators have historically been the political operators and “kingmakers” of Samoa.11 The conflicts of the late nineteenth century revolved around a small number of high titles that were controlled by powerful groups of orators, principally Tumua, based in the A‘ana and Atua district capitals of Leulumoega and Lufilufi on Upolu, and Pule, identified with the principal villages of the island of Savai‘i. Both Samoans and foreigners recognized that certain eminent titles represented major regional and familial alignments and were thus significantly different from other, lesser matai titles in stature and political potential. Although the principle of family election pertained in theory, in reference to the high titles the notion of ‘āiga was so broadened that these statuses were effectively regional rather than the purview of a village-based extended family.12 While still identified territorially with particular villages, the high titles attracted the allegiance and material support of non-local chiefs, so that putative “family” affiliations “cut across territorial boundaries” (Gilson 1970: 52). Moreover, “family”’ could be invoked honorifically, retrospectively, or persuasively. That genealogies were reckoned bilaterally, and were considered esoteric and privileged knowledge, maximized the possibilities for such appeals. The discursive embrace of ‘ āiga “family” reflected putative genealogical relationship but did not guarantee allegiance. Intrafamilial rivalries, assertions of village autonomy, and precedence claims by particular orator groups translated into frequent defections and swings of support. Additionally, disputation is inherent in the matai system because the relative rank order of supra-local titles is ambiguous. Within the village council (fono), the order of presentation of the cup in the kava ceremony reflects and publicly proclaims the relative ranking of local chiefs. But since visitors are served first as a matter of courtesy, the ali‘i in a travelling party followed by their orators, the relative rank of particular chiefly hosts and guests remains an open

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question. That “high chiefs” are always served categorically before orators elides other crucial disparities, for many ali‘i titles are insignificant in their political stature and are far outweighed by the important orator titles in all contexts except ceremonial protocol. Westerners’ difficulty in identifying a Samoan “king” among the high chiefs was compounded by their own readiness to use terms such as “king,” “royal,” and “princes” for statuses that were in no way equivalent to the European concepts. The quest was further complicated by the nature and functions of Samoan political discourse, notably the esoteric chiefly language employed by orators at public gatherings. Samoan ceremonial speech is rich in metaphors, metonyms, mythical allusions, and synonyms for places, titles, and groups of chiefs. The meanings are culturally overdetermined and incomprehensible to an outsider, as well as to most non-chiefly Samoans. The chiefly vocabulary is used broadly, honorifically, and evocatively to show courtesy and to persuade in the public arena. The power of this language to mollify and persuade is enhanced by its imprecision in matters of relative rank. Ceremonial discourse leaves national-level questions of precedence unanswered precisely because such questions can provoke violence and, in the past, could spiral into regional warfare. Every matai in a leadership position commands the allegiance of a group of untitled males, whose cultural job is to guard family and village honour. The untitled men were and are expected to be somewhat hotheaded and quick to avenge any perceived slight.13 Westerners looked to the ceremonial vocabulary for words that might denote status levels in a fixed rank hierarchy, and particularly they sought an equivalent for the notion of “king.” One candidate was Tui, apparently a borrowed Tongan word, which the missionary Samuel Ella (1895) alternately defined as “synonymous with king” and as “lord or king.” The paramounts of Tonga and Fiji were known to the Samoans as the Tui Tonga and Tui Fiti, and Tui prefixes the titles of the highest chiefs of A‘ana, Atua, and Manu‘a. Ella explained that the Tui A‘ana and Tui Atua belonged, moreover, to the category of “sacred chiefs” (ali‘i pa‘ia), those who “possess special titles” and “to whom very great deference is shown” (2). There were and are several other collective designations for chiefs of the highest rank. The Methodist missionary George Brown14 cited “a higher class of chiefs who were called tama o le Malo – sons of the Malo or conquering party. These were addressed as kings.” Then there were usoali‘i



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or “royal family,” Brown reported, those from whom the successor to a high title would be chosen. Gilson (1970: 62) interprets the honorific term tama‘ āiga (sons of families) to denote contenders for paramount rule (cf. Tuimaleali‘ifano 2006). Ceremonial inclusion in any of these categories could be used to justify a claim to higher rank. There was more than one Tui, but there could only be one king. A consensus developed among foreigners and elite Samoans that the indigenous prototype of kingship was the Tafaifā, an ancient term denoting a chief who held the four paramount titles known collectively as pāpā (Tui A‘ana, Tui Atua, Gato‘aitele, and Tamasoali‘i). Tafaifā was a unique status that could only be held by one person at a time. The first Tafaifā was the woman culture-hero, Salamasina (Kramer 1958 [1923]). Her kin connections included the Tui A‘ana and the Tui Manu‘a as well as the Tui Tonga and Tui Fiti (ibid.). Salamasina is said to have ruled in about the sixteenth century on the Western time scale. “From then on,” Gilson (1970: 58–9) writes, “the holding of a single pāpā title was not the highest honour but, rather, a means of contending for the Tafaifā.” Salamasina is said to have received the four titles consensually, “by free gift from all the Tumua.”15 Thereafter the position of Tafaifā was frequently sought after but seldom achieved by chiefs of the prominent families Sā Tupuā and Sā Malietoā (the prefix Sā denotes “family of” and lengthens the final vowel of the name, which is both a chiefly title and a family surname). There was no “royal line” through which the position descended; the four titles still had to be acquired individually by conquest or by winning over the orator groups that conferred them. All of the principal contenders for the kingship were descendants of Salamasina. The extent to which Salamasina’s dominion constituted “rule” in the sense of command authority is unclear and unrecoverable, but there is no evidence of a redistributive network such as pertained in Hawai‘i’s more stratified chieftainship. Ethnohistorical accounts stress that the pāpā titles and the status of Tafaifā conferred ceremonial superiority and a right to a degree of “courtesy” rather than effective power.16 Infrequently achieved, the preEuropean Tafaifā seems to imply symbolic centralization rather than national integration. Europeans presumed that they could treat Samoan cultural traditions and genealogies as a body of evidence that, assembled and analyzed objectively, would reveal the true king of Samoa. They

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erred in two crucial assumptions, however. First, by conflating “chiefs” with “kings” in the European sense, they presumed the existence of a single linear rank order in which each high chief had a defined position. No such fixed hierarchy could be established for Samoa, however, in part because relative rank beyond the village was ambiguous. Second, foreigners failed to recognize the disjuncture between ceremonial rank and effective power in the Samoan chieftainship. The ritual respect due to a particular matai title had nothing to do with the outcomes of chiefly conflicts. Military success, not a title’s genealogical precedence, was the means of establishing supra-local rule. Though many titles could qualify as belonging “to the highest rank” on customary grounds, only a few chiefs could mobilize the practical support required to contend for the Tafaifā. The identification of ruling power (pule) with conquest is conveyed by the word Mālō, one gloss of which is “to win.” Samoans referred to the three imperial nations collectively as Mālō Tetele, the “great governments” or “great powers.”’ In the course of the nineteenth century Mālō came to mean the “government” capable of keeping itself in place. In the nineteenth century none of the four titles that made up the Tafaifā either conferred or coincided with effective paramount power, that is, military supremacy. Other titles and “families” had risen to prominence in recent history – notably Malietoa, Tupua, and Mata‘afa – producing chiefs who, though not considered to be of the highest rank, contended for the Tafaifā titles through warfare. The first Malietoa to acquire the four titles was the Savai‘i chief Vai‘inupō, who in 1830 welcomed LMS missionary John Williams (Moyle 1984). Although most Samoans and foreigners equated the kingship with the status of Tafaifā, the word most commonly used for “king” was Tupu. The relationship between the statuses of Tupu and Tafaifā and their associated modes of legitimation was central to the latenineteenth century kingship disputes. The varied referents and changing meaning of the word Tupu illustrate the dynamic quality of Samoan political concepts and their responsiveness to context. The explorer Wilkes (1845: vol. 2, 152), who visited Samoa in 1839, reported that Tupu referred to the “highest class” of chiefs; arguably, as suggested above, the same could be said of ao, pāpā, and ali‘i pa‘ia. Gilson (1970: 117) notes that Tupu o Salafai “Paramount Chief of Savai‘i” was “a dignity created and first assumed by Tamafaigā,” the notoriously cruel chief who was defeated by



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Malietoa Vai‘inupō just prior to the arrival of John Williams in 1830. Vai‘inupō’s brother and successor, Taimalelagi, also claimed to be Tupu o Salafai in the 1840s, but A‘ana and Atua districts refused to acknowledge his pretensions “further than as a matter of courtesy” (Stair, in Ella 1895: 8). Missionaries Ella (1895: 4) and Stair (in Ella 1895: 6) used Tupu, not Tafaifā, when describing possession of the four titles. Stair even claimed that the position of Tupu was superior to that of Tui. In the context of the matai system the position of Tupu was anomalous and inherently ambiguous. Historically recent, the Tupu was an after-the-fact status not associated with any particular title (hence not identified with any locality or district) nor conveyed by any Samoan modes of selection involving orator groups or families. In these two characteristics Tupu was similar to the Tafaifā. Was the Tafaifā – or the Tupu – a “king” in the European sense? Certain key ideas dominated colonial discourse about the Samoan kingship: concentrated military power, a political centre, laws, bureaucracy, a “royal line” of regular succession. Of these, only “the idea … of a centralized Samoa” (Meleiseā 1987: 2) was unequivocally embodied in the Tafaifā. Only in this sense was the Tafaifā an indigenous prototype of monarchy. For Westerners, however, “kingship” implied not only unitary rule, but a particular governmental structure with legalistic institutions supported by a monopoly of force.

Conjuncture In late nineteenth-century Samoa “Tupu” was simultaneously a position of power to be pursued by both precedented and novel means, an institutional hybrid, and a contested narrative field. The pursuit of the kingship sedimented a direction in regional and factional rivalries, which increasingly took the form of a competition to acquire the pāpā. Some chiefly contenders sought first to establish themselves as Tupu through foreign patronage, then to claim the pāpā titles by means that other factions with their own foreign supporters viewed as illegitimate. The positions of Tupu and Tafaifā were thus equated or separated opportunistically, according to the contender’s political interests and bases of support. Representatives of the colonial powers were both actors on the scene and an audience of potential arbiters to be courted and swayed. Arms sales and the offshore presence of military force presented new opportunities for

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gaining advantage, and Great Power recognition of a government constituted a new, non-customary form of political legitimation. Effectively, Tupu came to denote a paramount ruler installed and/ or sustained by settler factions and imperial military force. During the kingship dispute both Samoans and foreigners heatedly debated questions of custom in public arenas such as the expatriate newspapers. Westerners took different points of view on the arcane cultural complexities. Some ridiculed Samoan factionalism and elaborate public etiquette as the trivial preoccupations of a primitive people. With the deepening involvement of the imperial nations in Samoan affairs, however, the significance of chiefly politics could not be ignored. Missionaries and other resident experts interviewed Samoan chiefs on political questions and earnestly attempted to construct an authoritative version of the system, all in quest of a precedent for a stable government. At issue in these researches were categorizations of the high titles; the nature of the collective labels – whether formulaic or constituting a charter for primacy; the relationships between these groupings – whether discrete, overlapping, or synonymous; as well as the relative authority of particular districts and orator factions to confer the paramount titles. But the information obtained from Samoans inevitably reflected regional, familial, and factional interests, with different versions equally defensible on grounds of customary precedent and genealogical charter depending on the source’s point of view. In foreign discourse during this period the issue of the kingship was bound up with contending assessments of Samoans as a people. Many settlers responded with zest to the intellectual challenges of Samoan tradition and set out to master the details and nuances as if the chieftainship were a challenging puzzle that any civilized man ought to be able to solve. Some foreigners proudly claimed insider knowledge on the basis of their friendships with high chiefs, and they argued over mythic events and chiefly bequests in letters to the editor of the Samoa Times. Frustrated consuls, planters, and traders invoked the Samoans’ failure to unify as evidence of cultural backwardness and political incompetence (e.g., Samoa Times, 30 Mar. 1878, 2; Samoa Weekly Herald, 2 Sept. 1893, 2). As early as 1880 the British vice-consul pessimistically suggested that Samoa had no indigenous equivalent to kingship and, moreover, that a foreignsupported monarch “is not in the least likely to lead to the formation of a strong and independent native Government” (Maudsley



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1880: 94). Calling the 1890s monarchy a “burlesque,” American Consul-General Mulligan (1895: 745) wrote, “A King and peace are irreconcilable.” In rebuttal, contemporaries argued that foreigners were responsible for the very instability that they ostensibly aimed to remedy (Maudsley 1880: 92; Mulligan 1895: 743; Samoa Times, 16 Mar. 1889, 2). The English missionaries tended to take a sympathetic liberal view of the situation, blaming settlers and governments for the Samoans’ apparent inability to unite. “The fact is,” Ella wrote, “an established constitution existed from ancient times, but foreign Powers have ignored the native constitution and sought to establish a policy of their own construction” (1895: 1). Foreigners looked back with longing on Malietoa Vai‘inupō (Tavita), who was said to be the last “undisputed” Tafaifā.17 Vai‘inupō won a decisive military victory in 1830, the year that he met missionary John Williams and ostensibly converted to Christianity, and on these counts he appeared the most credible leader to Europeans during the first decade of intensive Western contact (Gilson 1970: 59–60; Henry 1979 [1958]: 134–42; Kramer 1942 [1902]: 27; Williams 1830 in Moyle 1984). He obtained the four titles over a course of years, and it is uncertain how long he held them before his death in 1841 (Gilson 1970: 88n64; Henry 1979 [1958]: 142; Kramer 1942 [1902]: 28). Malietoa’s dying bequest (mavaega) was that there should be no more Tafaifā; the titles were to be “scattered” among the districts. Malietoa named his brother Taimalelagi to inherit the titles Gato‘aitele, Tamasoali‘i, Malietoa, and the honorific “Tupu o Salafai,” while Tui A‘ana and Tui Atua went to chiefs of those districts (Gilson 1970: 117). Despite missionary counsels for peace and attempts to prohibit war by expelling combatants from church membership, the 1840s and 1850s were marked by chronic warfare. But these conflicts centred around issues of regional dominance – who was to be Mālō and who vaivai, the defeated or “the weak” – rather than pursuit of the Tafaifā titles as such. Although interdistrict disputes had implications for the bestowal of the pāpā, the kingship crystallized as the focus of conflict only in subsequent decades. Gilson (1970: 121) notes that the war of 1848–57 was the last “in which European intrigues played no substantial part and the first to be influenced by European arms.” Actions by American and British warships became more frequent in the 1850s, albeit in local incidents involving crimes against their citizens rather than in any

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national-level cause (see Gilson 1970: 152–6, 198–221). At the close of the war in 1857 Mata‘afa Fagamanu of the Tupua family was Tui Atua and the other three pāpā titles were held by a relative of Malietoa Vai‘inupō (Gilson 1970: 262). In 1860 a split arose within Sā Malietoā over succession to the title, which “for the sake of peace” was divided between the principal contenders, Talavou and Laupepa.18 In the late 1860s, motivated in part by foreign counsel and appeals such as Captain Hope’s (quoted above), the chiefly councils of the different districts began to address the issue of governmental integration. At the time, given the apparent dormancy of the Tafaifā, the model for a national government favoured by most Europeans was a confederation of districts. The question of the head of state inevitably provoked disunity. In Tuamasaga, the central district of Upolu, the formation of a government foundered on the factional dispute between the two Malietoas, both of whom were declared “king of the Tuamasaga” by their supporters. Laupepa’s parliament began to meet in Apia (the capital of Samoa today) rather than Malie, the old district capital and customary residence of the Malietoas, “owing to advancing commerce and the increase of European merchants and settlers.” Talavou’s party followed suit, establishing a rival government at Mulinu‘u Peninsula on the other side of Apia Bay, and became known as the “Unionists” after espousing the aim of national confederation. In its efforts to craft a “union” the Talavou camp sought both European legitimation and Samoan-style dominance in the status of Mālō. “One must allow,” Gilson remarks in reference to Talavou’s confederation, “for the Samoans having played on the uninformed hopes of Europeans” (1970: 265). The conflict between the two Malietoas was not at first a “kingship” dispute. Although foreigners used the term “king” to describe the heads of the competing governments in Apia, at stake initially was the paramount chieftainship of Tuamasaga. Europeans of the time typically referred to the high chief of a district, such as the Tui Atua, as a “king.” The issues of factional leadership and districtwide rule increasingly became conflated with the question of a national government, however, in Samoan political striving as well as in foreign conceptualization. The prevalence of the term “king” in contemporary European discourse points to the monarchical model’s prominence in the Western interpretive “vision” of Samoan political authority. The significance of the Malietoa dispute was amplified



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by the fact that Tuamasaga district included Apia, and despite the declaration of the town as a “neutral zone” foreigners were involved in the war as mediators, arms sellers, land grabbers, and occasionally as partisan targets. There were also national-level implications in the geographical dispersal of each contender’s adherents. Though Laupepa’s strongest support lay in Tuamasaga, and Talavou’s in the islands of Manono and Savai‘i, each had adherents in every district. What appeared to foreigners as a lack of consensus could be construed by either party, paradoxically, as a claim to national representativeness. Pursuing this strategy, some pro-Talavou chiefs of Atua and A‘ana came to Apia ostensibly “to mediate,” Turner reported, “but in reality wished to constitute a new government for the whole of Upolu, Manono and Savaii” (Turner, ms). Laupepa expelled the Unionist delegates from Apia in 1869 and became – briefly – the self-proclaimed “king” of an all-Samoa government (Whitmee 1870). Talavou prevailed militarily over the short term, and in an earlier time might have attained the status of Mālō. But Samoan political conflicts were now further complicated by foreign interference in various forms, from acts of callous exploitation, such as the arms sales and land grabbing of the early 1870s (see Gilson 1970: 271–90), to peacemaking attempts. Henceforth the presence of external military forces made it impossible for any faction to achieve a decisive victory and establish paramount rule by conquest – the Mālō. At the urging of resident foreigners, particularly the missionaries, the two Malietoas made peace in 1873, and Talavou withdrew to Savai‘i. In a significant event for the kingship quest, the chief who held three of the four pāpā titles died in 1870. Tuimaleali‘ifano Sualauvi – described by one missionary19 as “the king of Aana & Atua” – lacked only the Tui Atua title to be the Tafaifā, but he supported Laupepa and did not contend for the kingship. “Both war parties joined in paying him funeral honours,” the missionary reported. This example underscores the separation between ceremonial rank and political power and the discontinuity between Tafaifā and Tupu in Samoan conceptualization. The 1870s were a decade of governmental experimentation during which, for the most part, the “kingship” was an institutional office designed largely by Westerners and having little to do with the Tafaifā. Foreigners counselled the Samoans to establish a central government but at the time, and for the next quarter of a century, many anticipated that one of the Western powers would soon annex

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Figure 2.2.  Mata‘ata Iosefo.

the islands. In 1878 the editor of the Samoa Times (2 Mar., 2) noted with exasperation that “during the past four years we have had no less than five different forms of government, none of which appear to have given satisfaction to the various native factions.” In 1873 the Samoan chiefs formed a bicameral government at Mulinu‘u Peninsula; to avoid reviving the kingship controversy none of the principal contenders for the Tafaifā titles was included in the new government (Gilson 1970: 292), which lasted about fifteen months. “The natives were then tired of the republican form of government,” according to the jaded Samoa Times editor (30 Mar. 1878, 2), “and were desirous of making a kingdom of their country.” The Mulinu‘u government then devised a dual kingship, with the lower house of the legislature to select one king from Sā Malietoā and one from Sā Tupuā. The latter compromise seemed only to exacerbate factional antagonism, however, as Malietoa Laupepa was chosen over Talavou, and a chief



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named Pulepule was selected over Mata‘afa Iosefo (Figure 2.2), who appeared the strongest Tupua candidate. Mata‘afa’s supporters accused the LMS missionaries of lobbying against him because he was a Roman Catholic (Gilson 1970: 312). The dual kingship lasted only a few months. An American adventurer, “Colonel” A.B. Steinberger, had established an extraordinary degree of rapport with the Samoans, and in 1875 proposed a new constitution.20 Steinberger’s solution was an alternating kingship, with representatives of the Malietoa and Tupua families to take turns holding the office in four-year terms. The plan was acceptable to Samoans, Gilson (1970: 314) notes, because the new “king” was to be “merely a figure-head,” without the status of Mālō. Effective administrative power was given to Steinberger, whom the Samoans named as premier. But ten months after Malietoa Laupepa became the first “king” under the new constitution, Steinberger himself was deposed at the instigation of foreign settlers, backed by an American warship. Laupepa was pressured to sign Steinberger’s deportation order, and was then himself deposed by the Samoan legislature. The American naval captain unsuccessfully attempted to restore Laupepa by force, provoking a bloody clash in which several Samoans and sailors were killed. In the aftermath of the Steinberger affair Samoans were ever more internally divided.21 With both the Tafaifā and the constitutional kingship vacant the Laupepa/Talavou rivalry resurfaced, and factions formed around two contenders from the Tupua family, Tui Atua Mata‘afa and Tui A‘ana Tupua Tamasese: “Many of them say that the day that is appointed to make a new King is the day that war will commence in earnest in Samoa.”22 The Mulinu‘u parliament upheld the Steinberger constitution and remained in place, but it failed to perform the functions that foreigners expected of a central government.23 Laupepa set up a rival capital in A‘ana district but was defeated by the Mulinu‘u forces, which thus attained, in Samoan eyes, the status of Mālō. But the regime still came up short as a “government” in the estimation of Westerners and was vulnerable to foreign pressure, plotting, and Steinberger-style political entrepreneurship.24 In late 1878 Talavou’s party declared him “king” and took the place of the parliamentary regime in Mulinu‘u. One of Talavou’s strategies for establishing his government’s legitimacy was to proclaim laws and circulate them to the foreign consuls.25 He signed these as Malietoa, the “Tupu.”

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War broke out again in late 1879 between Talavou’s forces and the “old Government party.”26 By the terms of a peace agreement negotiated on board a German warship, Malietoa Talavou was appointed king (Tupu) for life and Laupepa made Regent (Sui Tupu, vice-king or king’s representative) to “attend to the work of the king” (Samoa Times, 10 Apr. 1880, 2). Amid shifting factional alignments another war erupted (Gilson 1970: 372–3). Talavou’s death changed the political scene, however, and the Tupua chiefs emerged as Laupepa’s principal rivals in contention for the kingship. In 1881 Laupepa was again proclaimed king through a peace settlement negotiated, this time, on an American ship. The agreement revived Steinberger’s idea of an alternating Malietoa/Tupua kingship; Tamasese was named regent and was to succeed Laupepa after a term later set at seven years. Laupepa’s credentials for the kingship were debated in the expatriate newspaper Samoa Times. A pro-Laupepa writer (30 Apr. 1881, 2) cited as supporting evidence the perpetual bequest of “the chief rule” by a Malietoa ancestor. Another correspondent countered (14 May 1881, 2): “there is only one of the whole line of Malietoas who can be said to be a King, and that was Tavita [Vai‘inupō] … Malietoa is the family name of a chief, of a second grade … [inferior to] the princes or higher chiefs of the Group called the Alo alii. Laupepa is a true Malietoa by descent, but has no claim to a King through the name.” Vai‘inupō, according to this writer, was the adopted son of one Pea Tavini of Manono, on whom the districts of Upolu bestowed the four high titles, “yea, the Kingship … In Samoan custom a chief holding these titles is a King, or highest divinity.” A third correspondent (17 May 1881, 2) criticized all parties for discussing chiefly genealogies in print: “The consequences of doing so among the Samoans themselves have often been terribly severe.” Nevertheless, he offered his own conclusion on the matter: that Malietoa was neither a second-rank title nor subservient to another group of chiefs. The writer also challenged the others’ interpretations of chiefly terms of address as indicating relative status, and asserted the priority of the category Tama‘ āiga: “There are but two chiefs to whom this title properly belongs … Malietoa and Mataafa.” Though initially supported by the Western powers, the Malietoa government had little effective power over either Samoans or foreign settlers. What authority it did have was steadily undermined by foreign intriguing, notably on the part of German officials



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and the major German trading firm in the islands, the Deutsche Handels- und Plantagen Gesellschaft der Südseeinseln zu Hamburg (DHPG).27 The company had long taken advantage of the conflicts by aggressively acquiring land in exchange for arms and ammunition, and it now waged a campaign to subjugate or dislodge the Malietoa regime. Under pressure from the firm’s manager and the German consul, who were supported by warships, Malietoa yielded legal authority to German officials. The government’s opponents were encouraged to break with his regime, and in January 1885 the Tumua orator group issued a statement that they were through with Malietoa and were supporting Tupua Tamasese; Mata‘afa was one of the signers.28 In another declaration addressed to “all men” (tagata uma), the Tumua chiefs blamed Malietoa’s “stupidity” for causing the trouble between Samoa and Germany, and asserted that “foreigners have no right to rule Samoa; this authority still rests with Tumua.”29 Tamasese established a rival government in Leulumoega, the principal village of A‘ana district, and began sending out letters headed “the capital [laumua] of Samoa” and signed by himself as “Tupua the king [Tupu] of Samoa.” Both sides in the “A‘ana rebellion” invoked customary precedent in public appeals to the foreign audience. From Leulumoega the chiefs of Tamasese’s legislature wrote to the British consul to inform him of “the belief that is customary in our country.”30 “Malietoa is not the name of the King of Samoa. It is only the name of a chief of one town. It is a new thing to call Malietoa the King of Samoa.” The pāpā titles, they continued, are the “true designation of the King of all Samoa” and “it is Tumua that have the authority over them.” The chiefs also claimed that Malietoa had little support among Samoans, and was only in power because of Great Power meddling.31 Learning of this missive, Malietoa Laupepa wrote directly to Queen Victoria to explain “the customs of our country beginning from ancient times” in his own favour: Malietoa is indeed the name of the King of Samoa. It has been taught in all parts of Samoa from former times … Malietoa has the true authority over the Papa because Tui Atua and Tui A‘ana were true sons of Malietoa. Likewise Tamasoali‘i and Gato‘aitele … became high titles by the command of Malietoa Uitualagi on account of their kindness to his son Malietoa La‘auli … only a chief of Sa Malietoa can give any of these titles.32

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Malietoa asserted, moreover, that it was a “new idea” for Tumua to claim collective authority over Tui Atua and Tui A‘ana, for these titles were created by a Tuamasaga chief in conjunction with Malietoa. Therefore Malietoa rightfully controlled “all of the papa.” Malietoa and the legislature were ousted from Mulinu‘u – evicted by the DHPG – and set up a government in exile in Tuamasaga. Tamasese’s short-term success was immediately attributable to the presence of German warships, but questions of customary legitimation continued to concern foreign observers as well as the Samoan protagonists. Depending on the cause to be served, partisan discourse asserted the priority and the fixity of formal rank relations, or the principle of conquest and the right of the Mālō. The missionary Newell jotted in his diary: “The Malietoa acquired by conquest the Tafaifa … Malietoa is not Tupu but Tupua is the Tupu by hereditary descent.”33 In his notes Newell differentiated rule by conquest from “the real pule” – pule meaning authority – which was legitimated by reference to genealogies and myth-historical political relationships. As illustrated by Malietoa’s letter to Queen Victoria, however, such precedents were eminently contestable. In 1887 the German consul and the DHPG manager sent a company employee and ex-military officer named Eugen Brandeis to assume the position of premier under Tamasese. For a year and a half Brandeis effectively ran the government, using German military backing to institute what Gilson (1970: 393) has called a “reign of terror.” Malietoa surrendered to Brandeis and the German consul and was exiled from the islands. Arguably the regime’s most tyrannical acts involved the collection of taxes, which the Samoans raised by mortgaging their lands and their copra to the German company (Linnekin 1991c). With the government’s support, the DHPG firm was able to contract agreements that prevented the Samoans from trading with other companies.34 During the Brandeis-Tamasese regime, for the first time in post-contact Samoa, one Western power exercised a monopoly of force in the archipelago and used it to compel Samoans to obey the laws of a national government. The degree of force required to accomplish this, however, appeared egregious to the other Western powers and led to a revolt by the Samoan factions that had once supported Tamasese. For Samoans, the critical provocation was Tamasese’s appropriation of the pāpā. Holding only the Tui A‘ana title but encouraged by Brandeis to claim the others, Tamasese began to sign his proclamations “Tuiaana Tuiatua Tamasese o le Tupu,” “Tamasese the King” (emphasis added).



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Atua district was so outraged by this pretension that German naval intervention was required and a number of chiefs were imprisoned (Gilson 1970: 394). Support grew for Tui Atua Mata‘afa, who was appointed both Malietoa and Tupu by the orator groups Tumua and Pule.35 Once again there were two competing “national” governments issuing correspondence from the “capital of Samoa.” Tumua and Pule claimed to express the will of “all Samoa” and styled themselves “Rulers of Samoa” (Samoa Times, 29 Sep. 1888, 1). The Brandeis-Tamasese government was driven from Mulinu‘u in October 1888 and set up their “capital” in an inland village. This conflict nearly brought the three Western powers to war; their confrontation ended in the famous Apia hurricane disaster of March 1889, in which six foreign warships were destroyed. To many observers the hurricane debacle symbolized the futility and the costs of continued Great Power rivalry over Samoa. One school of foreign opinion held that Westerners had erred in preventing the Samoans from settling the question of the Mālō militarily: “Make as many governments as you like there will always be two factions till one conquers the other” (Samoa Times, 16 Mar. 1889, 2). Nevertheless, the three powers attempted to exert more control in the immediate aftermath rather than less. Malietoa returned in 1889 and accepted the major factions’ decision to appoint Mata‘afa king and himself the vice-king (Gilson 1970: 417). But in the 1889 Berlin conference the Western nations proclaimed Malietoa Laupepa king, thereby assuring continued factional strife in the 1890s. Many claimed that Mata‘afa had the support of most Samoans,36 while the Laupepa government, ineffectual and isolated in Apia, was kept in power by Western naval support (Samoa Weekly Herald, 15 July 1893; Gilson 1970: 420). Mata‘afa styled himself Malietoa Mata‘afa, effectively asserting his equivalence with Laupepa, and both chiefs claimed the Tui A‘ana title. In 1893 Mata‘afa was deported and fines were imposed on the “rebel towns” (Samoa Weekly Herald, 29 July, 5 Aug.). But the rebellion continued, and foreigners despaired that a stable “kingship” was possible: “Whatever king you place upon the throne there is certain to be opposition within a very short time” (Chief Justice Cedercranz, in Samoa Weekly Herald, 16 Dec. 1893; cf. 2 Sept.). In 1895 the chiefs of Tumua issued a peace declaration, combined with a request that Malietoa resign: “The Tumua knows of no chief who would be acceptable to all Samoa. Therefore they ask … that the title of ‘King of Samoa’ be abolished.”37 Tumua asked

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for elections, a provision of the 1889 Berlin Act, and a meeting of Samoan chiefs to decide on a suitable form of government. But Laupepa was ill and new would-be kings were emerging. In 1898 Laupepa died and Mata‘afa returned to Samoa, precipitating the final act of the kingship struggle. Mata‘afa met an enthusiastic welcome from the Tupua family and was proclaimed king by Tumua and Pule, but he was opposed by the Tamasese and Malietoa factions, who supported Laupepa’s eighteen-year-old son Tanumafili (Gilson 1970: 425–7; Moors 1986 [1924]: 115). The Berlin Act provided that the highest legal authority in Samoa was the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and thus it came to pass that an American jurist named William Chambers came to decide the matter of the Samoan kingship in court. As evidence both the Mata‘afa and Tanumafili sides presented versions of custom and tradition. Tanumafili’s lawyers were Edwin Gurr and R.H. Carruthers, old Samoa hands with considerable knowledge of such matters, but Mata‘afa had only a German planter to represent him (Moors 1987 [1924]: 124–5). In the proceedings both Samoans and Europeans invoked indigenous modes of legitimation, such as genealogies and prior political fealty, to promote their candidate’s cause. But arguing the kingship in the context of “Samoan custom” inevitably opened the complex “evidence” to long-standing modes of contesting and challenge through partisan reinterpretation. That Tanumafili won may have been due at least in part to Gurr’s expertise and extensive research into Samoan political matters. In preparing his case Gurr38 marshalled an impressive array of genealogies, legends, and statements by orators, ranging over the fundamental issues in Samoan chiefly politics: the role of the tulāfale, the scope and authority of Tumua and Pule, the meaning and relative rank of pāpā and ao. Gurr used Newell’s work, which characterized Mata‘afa as an ao, a lesser title and, moreover, inferior in rank to Malietoa. Tanumafili claimed to hold the four pāpā, but this assertion was challenged by prominent orators on Mata‘afa’s side, citing “the customs of Samoa” and “Samoan beliefs” (“tū fa‘aSamoa”).39 Tanumafili was vulnerable on the issue of popular support (Moors 1986 [1924]: 115), and an American judge might be expected to take into account democratic ideals. To counter this point Gurr noted that majorities and the popular will have nothing to do with Samoan title decisions. To further undermine Mata‘afa’s credentials Gurr interpreted Tupua genealogies and the dying



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bequests (mavaega) of ancient chiefs to conclude: “Traditionally Mataafa ought not to be Tuiatua.”40 In the end, however, Chambers’s decision in favour of Tanumafili was based not on Samoan political custom but on a legal technicality. After the cultural evidence had been presented, Gurr and Carruthers argued that the protocols of the 1889 Berlin conference made Mata‘afa ineligible for kingship – an argument that Chambers accepted. On the day after the decision Mata‘afa’s forces occupied Apia; Tanumafili and Tamasese took refuge on a British ship in the harbour. The foreign consuls temporarily accepted Mata‘afa’s government but warfare broke out when American and British ships attempted to reinstate Laupepa (Moors 1986 [1924]: 126–52). The next and final international commission on Samoa concluded that the kingship was a concept foreign to Samoan culture and abolished the position (Moors 1986 [1924]: 159–68). Both Tanumafili and Chambers resigned, and the Great Powers developed the scenario for partition. Headed by the culturally astute Governor Wilhelm Solf, the German colonial administration of Western Samoa took a number of steps to forestall a resurgence of factional conflict over the paramount office. In place of the kingship Solf invented the office of Ali‘i sili or “highest chief” and appointed Mata‘afa to it. Solf emphasized repeatedly that the Kaiser was the highest authority over Samoa and the Ali‘i sili was but an underling. “Under all circumstances,” he wrote in his Annual Report, “the transfer of the title Tupu to Mataafa had to be avoided.”41 Not only was this the end of foreign designs for the kingship, but Solf’s long-term strategy for controlling the colony entailed systematically quashing the bases of Samoan national ambition. When the powerful orators raised trouble Solf “abolished” Tumua and Pule and forbade their mention in any ceremonial greeting (Samoanische Zeitung, 19 Aug. 1905). A new, officially authored and sanctioned national fa‘alupega greeting acknowledging the Kaiser (Kaisalika) first, then the Samoan Ali‘i sili, was promulgated instead.

Conclusion: A Structure of Resistance? In this essay I have examined the interaction of Western and indigenous political ideas in post-contact Samoa and have attempted to show how the conjunction of conceptual models played out in Samoan political action. I do not believe that Samoans ever had

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an indigenous “king” in the European sense. The Tafaifā was not a “king,” although it contained the notion of a unified Samoa; “unified” in what way remains unclear. Neither was the Tupu a monarch in its first incarnation, although in the late nineteenth century the term came to denote a Western-supported and, in part, Westernstyled “king.” Accordingly, neither were Tafaifā and Tupu conceptually equivalent or synonymous, though they came to be equated by both Samoans and foreigners in the course of the kingship disputes. Transformations in the meanings of Tafaifā and Tupu illustrate how foreign and indigenous concepts and constructions dynamically interact in contact situations. The vocabulary of “impacts” and “imposed” institutions cannot describe the cultural conjuncture that played out in the Samoan kingship saga. Western interpretations of the indigenous political system influenced Samoan attempts to design a government, as did the monarchical and parliamentary plans that foreigners variously promoted. Throughout, Samoans were not ineffectual recipients of colonial designs but creatively appropriated the Euro-American models presented to them, reinterpreting indigenous concepts in light of those models in order to advance culturally defined goals. Neither were the Samoan “kings” the puppets of foreign masters, but astute political operators attempting to take advantage of new sources of support and legitimation. In Samoan cultural politics the status quo, which Europeans saw as chronic disorder, was one of ongoing contestation between chiefly families. Supra-local ceremonial rank and political precedence had always been disputed in Samoa. The bases and the modes of competing for paramount authority were embedded in Samoan political process, which saw frequent low-level conflicts related to assertions of local autonomy and the protection of the “dignity” (mamalu) of titles, villages, and orator groups. During the kingship dispute the scope of paramount authority was extended in Samoan aspirations as chiefly factions came to pursue a monarchical vision of concentrated, centralized rule over the entire island chain. For their part, Westerners contributed to the efflorescence of Samoan chiefly rivalries by promoting self-interested political goals, and then by playing out their own national rivalries through partisan support of the contenders. Clearly, selective arms sales and military interference by colonial governments fomented the very disorder that foreigners aspired to cure with political engineering. Western interference



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had invidious effects on Samoan affairs, but Samoan intentions and actions were consequential in the denouement of the kingship dispute. My argument is not intended to reduce “the structure of the conjuncture” to the strivings of political agents, however. At a level quite distinct from the power seeking of ambitious individuals and factions, the culture in place affected the historical outcome. A dynamic, agonistic quality of contested decentralization was in the nature of the Samoan chieftainship. This quality brought EuroAmerican citizens and governments into a bitter conflict that, but for the hurricane disaster, seemed destined to escalate into an international war. For most of the nineteenth century, the contested decentralization of the Samoan political structure effectively thwarted the expansive mandate of imperial nation-states. During the past century anthropologists have documented innumerable contact situations in which trade goods and other introduced objects were creatively adopted by indigenous peoples, who situated them in native value schemes, incorporated them into customary exchanges, and variously put them to the service of culturally defined ends (see, e.g., Sahlins 1981a on the Hawaiian chiefs’ sumptuary use of Western goods). The Samoan kingship saga powerfully shows that introduced ideas and institutions, as well as material objects, are creatively interpreted in local settings and deployed in unexpected ways. In sites of foreign contact there is a dialectical interplay between indigenous and introduced ideas and symbolic schemes. Moreover, the kingship dispute is a cautionary tale for our own times, when the stated goal of US foreign policy is to replace authoritarian regimes abroad with our own model of national governance. From accruing and holding strategic territorial possessions, the mandate has shifted to that of aggressively “exporting democracy” to the unenlightened regions of the world.42 The events in nineteenth-century Samoa may appear alien and remote, but the goals and assumptions of the imperial nations during that period are strikingly familiar. In both cases, powerful industrial states decided that a Western governmental model would remedy political chaos in a peripheral place. Like “kingship,” “democracy” is a cultural idea as well as an institution. Like kingship, democracy is reinterpreted, given new meanings, and incorporated into the local scheme of things when it is introduced into a new cultural context. Like kingship, democracy cannot be “exported” without incurring unintended and unpredictable consequences.43

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Acknowledgments This chapter is based primarily on archival and documentary investigations conducted in several collections between 1985 and 1997. A sabbatical from the University of Hawai‘i and a fellowship at Macquarie University in Australia made possible research in the Mitchell Library, Sydney. A grant-in-aid from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research supported research in the National Archives of New Zealand and the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. A faculty development grant from the University of Hawai‘i funded investigations in the Nelson Memorial Library and the Marist Archives in Apia, (Western) Samoa. I thank all of these institutions for their generous support. For hospitality, patience, and instruction in matters fa‘a-Samoa, I extend my deepest gratitude to the Vaisagote family in Faleū, Manono. I thank John Mayer and Aumua Mata’itusi of the University of Hawai‘i for tutelage in Samoan language, culture, and ceremonial speech. During the long gestation of this essay several friends and colleagues have offered valuable comments and suggestions, including Stewart Firth, Kerry James, Samuel Martínez, Malama Meleiseā, and Caroline Ralston. For the deficiencies of the work, I alone am responsible.

Notes 1 Published sources will be cited in the body of the text, unpublished materials in endnotes. Citations to archival and manuscript sources employ the following abbreviations: ATL, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand; BCS, British Consular Archives, in NANZ; GAP, German Administration Papers (PMB 479); LMS SSL, London Missionary Society archives, South Seas Letters (Box/folder/jacket), microfilms in ML; ML, Mitchell Library, Sydney; MOM, Methodist Overseas Mission archives, in ML; NANZ, National Archives of New Zealand, Wellington; PMB, Pacific Manuscripts Bureau microfilms; SGP, Samoan Government Papers, in NANZ. 2 For the imperial perspective on this history, see Brookes (1941), Ellison (1938), Kennedy (1974), Masterman (1934), and Ryden (1933). Gilson’s history (1970) is regarded as authoritative for placing events within the Samoan cultural context. 3 Sunderland, 27 June 1854, LMS SSL 25/7/D; see also Williams (1832) in Moyle (1984: 238). 4 Letter, 8 Oct. 1835, MOM.



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5 Letter, 16 July 1836, MOM. Missionaries were making similar comments in 1870; cf. Pratt (1870) and Whitmee (1870) – both in LMS. 6 Captain Charles Hope of HBMS “Brisk,” July 1866, BCS 2/1; cf. Dyson (1882: 303); Pratt (1870); C.E. Stevens, Jan. 1876, BCS 7/3. 7 For European understandings and representations of monarchy, see Bloch (1973), Burns (1992), Cannadine (1983), Homans (1998), Le Roy Ladurie (1994). 8 Cf. Gilson (1970: 188), Hanson (1973), Holmes (1980), Marcus (1989), Meleiseā (1987), Sahlins (1958). 9 Erskine (1853: 85), Stevenson (1967 [1892]: 4). Peter Turner, letter of 16 July 1836, MOM; Williams (1832) in Moyle (1984: 238). 10 Robert Louis Stevenson, Samoa’s resident foreign celebrity in the 1890s, eloquently assessed the high chiefs as “a kind of a gagged audience for village orators … the chiefs of Samoa are surfeited with lip-honour, but the seat and extent of their actual authority is hard to find” (1967 [1892]: 4). 11 Ethnohistorical and scholarly sources concur on this point, see, e.g., Ella (1895: 597); Gilson (1970: 425–6); Edwin Gurr papers, ATL, folder 18; C.N.D. Hardie, ms “Diary of Rev. Charles Hardie, 1835–55,” p. 106, ML A368; Meleiseā (1987: 46–62). 12 In Samoan ceremonial greetings (fa‘alupega) and public oratory (lāuga), the local and regional factions that historically supported the holders of a particular chiefly title are referred to as the “families.” 13 There is ample ethnohistorical documentation of violent incidents provoked by insulting language or behaviour, pig stealing, breaches of etiquette, and title disputes, among other causes, see, e.g., Martin Dyson and Joseph King journals, ML; Samoan Reporter (1845–47, passim), in LMS, e.g. In the context of standing animosities between certain districts and localities, seemingly trivial altercations and disputes had the potential to escalate into wider conflicts. 14 Ms., ca. 1879, ML. 15 J.E. Newell papers, “Notes on Samoan customs in reference to Names and Titles,” LMS. 16 M. Dyson, 1863 journal, p 373, ML; A.P. Maudslay, “Memorandum on the State of Samoa,” 20 Oct. 1880, in Great Britain and Ireland Foreign Office Correspondence, F.O. 58/171; J. O’Hea, ms. “Journal of a Voyage to the South Sea Islands in the Eliza K. Bateson Brig,” 1862–63, ML ; Walpole (1849: 351); cf. Davidson (1967: 29). 17 Newell, “Notes on Samoan customs.” 18 My synopsis of the “war of the two Malietoas” is based on missionary George Turner’s manuscript, “The War in Upolu in 1869,” 16 Apr. 1869, LMS SSL, and on Gilson (1970: 259–90), Pratt (1870), and Whitmee (1870).

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19 Whitmee, 31 Aug. 1870, LMS SSL . 20 For the Steinberger affair, see Gilson (1970: 291–331), Ryden (1933: 95–9), Steinberger (1874). 21 Comments in contemporary archival materials include Goward to Seward, in Great Britain and Ireland (1878: 17); J. Mathison 2 Aug. 1876, MOM . 22 J.S. Austin, 10 Oct. 1877, MOM . 23 Maudsley to Gordon, Great Britain and Ireland (1878: 145); Samoa Times, 30 Mar. 1878, p. 2. 24 Gilson (1970: 345–57); A.H. Gordon, Memorandum, 10 May, Great Britain and Ireland (1879: 38). 25 E.g., to British Consul Swanston, 3 June 1879, BCS 2/1. 26 G. Pritchard, “Memo for the Consuls,” 14 Nov. 1879, BCS 2/1. 27 Gilson (1970: 376–82); Jan. 1885 correspondence in BCS 2/5. 28 Dated 19 Jan. 1885, BCS 2/5. 29 Dated 3 Feb. 1885, BCS 2/5. 30 “O le tu e masani ai lo matou nei atunuu.” My translation. 31 Ta’imua and Faipule to Powell, 28 July 1885, BCS 2/5. 32 Dated 18 Aug. 1885, BCS 2/5. 33 J.E. Newell papers, 7 Apr. 1885, LMS . 34 Correspondence in 1888, BCS 2/7; SGP , series 1. 35 Tumua and Pule and Aiga to British Consul Coetlogon 9 Sept. 1888, BCS 2/7. 36 One of his most prominent foreign supporters was Robert Louis Stevenson (1967 [1892]). 37 Dated 13 June 1895, SGP 2/2. 38 Ms papers of Edwin Gurr, ATL . 39 Tumua and Pule and Lauaki et al. to Chambers, 20 Dec. 1898, SGP 2/4. 40 Ms papers, folder 18, ATL . 41 GAP 17/C/7, 1900–1901. 42 For an introduction to the diversity of views on this policy, see Muravchik (1991), Lowenthal (1991), and Wiarda (1986, 1997). 43 Issues raised by the Samoan ethnohistorical investigations led to my current long-term research project, a study of comparative constructions of “democracy” in developing nations, with a focus on Latin America.

Slow Time: The Knowability of the Neolithic

3 Slow Time: Culture, Materiality, and the Knowability of the Neolithic Webb Keane Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time … Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

In its origins, anthropology was a response not only to the colonial encounter with difference, but also to the discovery of deep time (Shryock and Smail 2011, Trautmann 1992). One of the most dangerous consequences of the convergence of global reach and deep time, of course, was to conflate the two, equating others with ancients. Disciplinary self-critique eventually made it obvious that such an equation was hopelessly naive if not outright vicious, or worse. In response, many cultural anthropologists came to confine their claims to the particularity of local knowledge (Geertz 1983). Others moved toward an increasingly narrow focus on the present or very recent past. One outcome of this temporal narrowness has been a lack of perspective even on our own condition, a tendency to attribute to modernity either too much novelty, or none at all. Either all is changed, or it has always been thus. Against this trend, Marshall Sahlins’s work has taken place at both poles of the anthropological project, both its broadest perspective and its most fine-grained ethnographic specificity. It is exemplary in its refusal to insist that one must come at the expense of the other. If “The Original Affluent Society” (1972, first appearing in French, see 1968b) drew on comparisons across a vast range of cases, from

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contemporary ethnography to the archaeology of the Palaeolithic, Islands of History (1985a) argued for the specificity of old Hawai‘i, its incommensurability and irreducibility to terms defined within other worlds. At the same time, Sahlins’s work has given us one of the deepest analyses of the nature of the paradox that makes the comparative project so problematic. The theme is already there in “The Original Affluent Society” and still found in “Cosmologies of Capitalism” (1989b, 1994b) some twenty years later, although perhaps the fullest expression of the argument is developed by Culture and Practical Reason, chronologically midway between them in 1976. The paradox has one source in the way in which culture has been defined in contrast to determinism. Crucial to Sahlins’s understanding of culture is the principle of something that might be called (not, I think, his expression) collective choice. Cultural forms cannot be explained by necessity (e.g., the need for protein) or some mechanical principle of determination (e.g., the inexorable effects of new technologies). They express choices made by communities on the basis of values and goals that themselves cannot be reduced to some pre-existing rationale. Given certain ecological, demographic, and technological circumstances, the prevailing social arrangements, political interests, and cosmological orders could always have turned out other than they did. Cultural forms therefore manifest the fundamentally underdetermined character of human social life, its basic freedom from natural or mechanical determinism. In Sahlins’s later work, one implication of this assertion begins to emerge more clearly: since they are underdetermined, cultures are marked by an irreducible contingency in their very sources: they are inherently historical in nature. If this means they are irreducibly situated in time, we might extrapolate a further conclusion, that they are in some sense oriented to some projected future, even if that future is imagined as a continuation of the past. The retrospective understanding of the observer must not overlook this temporal character of cultural projects: if Cook is Lono, that is, in part, because he must become Lono. Contingent in their pasts, oriented to imagined futures, societies cannot be reduced to either an origin or a destiny. It is because of this principle of choice or relative freedom, that the human sciences cannot be modelled on the natural sciences, an assumption that came to dominate mainstream social and cultural anthropology after the 1960s (see Keane 2005). In the struggle to establish this principle, anthropologists of Sahlins’s generation



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tended to treat the opposition between choice and determinism as inseparable from that between the symbolic and material dimensions of society. That Sahlins’s position has largely won the day is evident in the way it has been taken up by many of those who are methodologically most rooted in the materiality of human worlds, archaeologists. For instance, David Lewis-Williams writes “increasing sedentism, socio-economic competition, climatic change and population increase do not in themselves lead inexorably to agriculture or the domestication of animals” (2004: 29), and Ian Hodder remarks of Grahame Clark approvingly “it was this social choice which, when released from environmental constraint, created the diversity of human culture” (1999: 177). Identifying deterministic explanation with materialism, and social choices with symbolism has had unintended consequences. By rendering the locus of choice in an immaterial domain, culture has effectively been removed from the realm of causality and even phenomenological experience to the extent that it is hard to see how choices could have consequences. Furthermore, if there is no exterior rationale for cultural choices, then there is no general principle by which cultural formations can be explained. Each must be taken on its own terms. Yet if each is taken on its own terms, there is no guarantee that any category of analysis can be legitimately applied across cases. If certain social or cultural forms can be explained by certain determinant conditions, it should in principle be possible to compare either similar forms or similar conditions. Not so if those forms are chosen. Cultures are, in principle, radically incommensurate. Yet the very argument itself rests on the most general kind of claim, that culture is by definition something that exceeds the demands of necessity, and that all humans are cultural, or, put another way, that to be human is to be defined by the principle of choices that go beyond necessity. On what basis can we make such broad claims? Another way of asking this question is this: how can we develop an anthropology that fulfils its original promise of breaking out of our limits in order to know worlds beyond our own? As a preliminary response to this question, I want to turn to an area of anthropology that has never abandoned the perspective of deep time, archaeology. For if cultural worlds are produced by human imaginings, over the very long run, it would be in the deep temporal perspective offered by archaeology that we may begin to get a hold on the way

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in which distinct worlds are constituted. It is because of my interest in these questions about the possibilities for comparison and the effort to overcome our temporal parochialism that in 2006 I agreed to take part in a project that lies dramatically far afield from my own scholarly territory in contemporary Indonesia, and accept an invitation to think about Neolithic religion in Turkey (see Hodder 2010, 2014). In this essay I want to explore the possibilities for comparison and the knowledge of deep time by looking at some questions raised by prehistoric evidence. Why even seek a Neolithic religion? After all, given the nature of the evidence, the chances of giving any demonstrable content to prehistoric religion are vanishingly small (for a review of the major approaches in archaeology, see Fogelin 2007). In the face of this, we may wonder what desire compels so elusive a quest. One element of this desire today seems to be the idea that religion, like culture, is a privileged locus for discovering human freedom from natural determinism and the concomitant ability to create new worlds and the work within realities that extend beyond the immediate here and now of direct experience. This doesn’t require a search for something that will fit the model of contemporary perceptions of religion as faith in something transcendental. Rather, we may recall here a remark of Leslie White’s that, in Sahlins’s words, “no ape … can tell the difference between holy water and distilled water” (Sahlins 2008e: 320). The category of religion, in this view, seems to stand in for, or to apotheosize, a distinctly human principle of constituted realities. Yet even if we provisionally accept this motive, how should we distinguish religion from the more general category of culture? Since the search for Neolithic religion depends, first, on defining religion in terms broad enough that they span the gap between discursively available worlds to the distant, silent, past, we could follow Talal Asad (1993; see also Masuzawa 2005) and cast a politically skeptical eye on the stakes and the interests in even asking for a definition of universal religion; however, that would be a different task (see Keane 2007, esp. chapter 3). For now I want to avoid the temptation to dismiss the question out of hand, since my aim is to keep open the question of deep time. If we accept that some speculation can be a useful way to open up the evidence, we must still be wary of the overwhelming tendency in religious speculation to project the author’s particular desires and preoccupations onto prehistory, prematurely



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eliminating what Hodder has called its “strangeness and ‘otherness’” (2006: 32). And yet, as Charles Sanders Peirce made clear long ago, science should involve a step we might call “a guess at the riddle,” the abduction of likelihoods, if it is not to be mired in narrow empiricism. So we are presented with the question of how to reconcile two demands, that we imagine ways to understand the evidence without foreclosing the possibility that what we are trying to imagine might be radically strange to us. In reviewing the archaeological record, I will suggest that much of what seems to fit received categories of religion lies at one end of a continuum of forms of attention and hierarchies of value that range from relatively unmarked to marked. Prehistory is, perhaps, the limit case for comparison or any knowledge of social and cultural things at all. What can we learn from the mute evidence of things? What can we know about the deep past? What of human creative activities might we draw out from the slow time of still objects? I will argue for a materialist semiotic that restores causality to our understanding of social processes without returning to reductionism, functionalism, or determinism. It does so by attending to the ways on which decisions must be realized materially, and therefore bring about new circumstances not simply as their purposes, but as the necessary pre-conditions demanded by those purposes. A materialist semiotic, combined with a fully social theory of objectification, can help us in rethinking the place of causality in the analysis of society and history.

Çatalhöyük’s Neolithic Çatalhöyük is the site of a Neolithic settlement in central Anatolia that was inhabited from about 7200 to 6200 BCE. By the beginning of this period, the process of sedentization was already well under way in the Middle East. Human sociality had reached at an unprecedented new scale, density, and degree of continuity over time. The domestication of food plants, sheep, and goats had been accomplished, although cattle remained wild. As elsewhere, the Neolithic in Anatolia was marked by a massive increase in the sheer quantity of things made by people, including buildings, pottery, and textiles. For the first time people were spending their daily lives in environments that were largely of human construction or subject to ongoing human manipulation, in towns, agricultural fields, and pastures (Watkins 2004). Rather than ranging widely in accord with the

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season, people’s activities were confined to a more or less bounded territory year round, although the people of Çatalhöyük also participated in some kind of long-distance exchange networks (for a recent summary, see Hodder 2007). Two things in particular have drawn special attention to Çatalhöyük: its architecture and its art. Çatalhöyük is unusual for its large size, with an estimated population between 3,000 and 8,000 (Hodder 2006: 56). It was a densely packed agglomeration of more or less similar rectangular buildings, interspersed with some herding pens (Düring 2001). Most of these houses contained ovens, hearths, food storage bins, pillars, and benches along some walls. In some houses, the dead were buried within the benches. Although the houses were similar in basic structure and size, and remained so for centuries, there are some important variables that distinguish among them. These are the presence or absence of burials, wall paintings, and mouldings (cut-out reliefs, animal sculptures, cattle horns, and other items set into the walls). It is above all these distinguishing elaborations – so-called art – that have made Çatalhöyük famous and have provoked most of the speculations about its inhabitants’ “religion.” Çatalhöyük has yielded the earliest known paintings on human-made surfaces, as opposed to rocks, cave walls, bone, or other natural objects. One of the bestpreserved paintings is commonly said to show large vultures with human feet and small, headless humanlike forms. Others display large animals (a stag, a boar, perhaps an equid) surrounded by numbers of small humans. One depicts what appear to be two cranes facing each other (Russell and McGowan 2003). The rooms’ walls also contain painted plaster reliefs of leopards and bears, and embedded in walls, pillars, and benches are bucrania, the plastered-over skulls and horns of wild cattle, sometimes set in rows, and skulls of fox and weasel. Some walls bore protuberances, within which were hidden the lower jaws of wild boars. Whereas these dramatic forms of elaboration are closely associated with architectural structures, there are also large quantities of tiny, crudely shaped figurines that are typically found in domestic rubbish heaps between houses, although some ended up in oven walls, in house walls, beneath floors, or in abandoned houses. Among these figurines is perhaps the most famous single object from Çatalhöyük, resembling a heavy-set human, apparently a female, her arms resting on two felines. This image helped give rise to the early



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speculations that Çatalhöyük was home to a Mother Goddess cult (Gimbutas 1982, Mellaart 1967; cf. Meskell 1998). Most, however, are more roughly shaped to form vaguely human or animal-like forms, in some cases with detachable heads or showing evidence of having their heads intentionally broken off (Voigt 2000, Nakamura and Meskell 2006, Meskell 2004). A few intriguing patterns are emerging from the data. First, certain kinds of art bear a strong relationship to specific locations within the dwellings, whereas others, notably the figurines, do not. By contrast to the figurines, the relief sculptures and bucrania are integral to the architecture, being embedded in walls, beams, and pillars (Hodder 1999: 188). Relief sculptures seem to have been long-lasting and subject to periodic renewal through replastering. Some evidence even suggests that old bucrania were dug out of older layers of the house to be retrieved for reuse when later houses were built (189). Just as bucrania were plastered, so too were some human skulls, which were, in effect “refleshed” (Hodder 2006: 148). If the reliefs were a more or less permanent feature of the experience of living in the house, and like plaster and whitewash, subject to periodic renewal, this was not apparently the case for paintings. The paintings were plastered over, and seem to have had a short life span, “rare, transient events” (Matthews, Wiles, and Almond 2006: 285). These paintings seem to occur primarily in the “cleaner” parts of the house, away from main food preparation and storage areas (Hodder 1999: 186). The subject matter of the paintings focuses on wild animals, above all, leopard and red deer. These are animals whose actual remains are rare in the settlement, in contrast to those of roe deer and sheep, the most common faunal remains, which are never portrayed in paintings. The buildings themselves range along a continuum from unelaborated to elaborated. A preliminary analysis (Düring 2001: 10–11; see also Düring 2003) found that 20 per cent of buildings have burials and mouldings. Sixty per cent of burials occur in buildings that also have elaborations such as mouldings. Only 20 per cent of buildings have elaborations. Hodder (2006: 50) sees this pattern of oppositions emerging from the data: pottery and utilitarian stone implements versus grave goods; everyday consumption of domesticated animals versus feasting on and portrayal of wild animals; southern part of the house versus northern; undecorated parts of house versus decorated; lower darker, dirtier floors near ovens versus whiter (plastered),

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cleaner floors near burials; and an overarching conclusion that these manifest a contrast between everyday routine and ritual life. In this latter conclusion we see one expression of the general run of interpretations, which takes decoration and art to be “symbolic” and therefore to be evidence of “religion.” This set of oppositions is potentially very productive, and I will draw on it. It can also, however, play into some old categories that may do as much to hinder our understanding as further it.

From “Art” to “Religion” at Çatalhöyük The Neolithic is commonly defined not only in terms of technological developments, plant and animal domestication, and new settlement patterns, but as ushering in a dramatic new degree of elaborateness in the human manipulation of symbols. Çatalhöyük’s art is famous, in part, because it seems to exemplify this new degree of symbolic activity (see Last 1998). Mimetic imagery in particular can promise a certain intimacy, for it seems to allow us to see through the eyes of others, and it is perhaps impossible to resist the feeling expressed by Augustin Holl, that “of all the artifacts left to us in the debris of vanished cultures … artworks bring us closer to their makers than anything else” (2004: 143). And in turn, it is Çatalhöyük’s “art” more than anything else that has inspired the most speculation about its inhabitants’ “religion.” In fact, it often turns out the relationship between art and religion is virtually pre-determined by the way in which the writers have defined them. In both cases, the main diagnostic by which any material remains are identified as art or as evidence of religion is their apparent lack of utility. According to Jacques Cauvin, for example, the symbolic revolution was manifested early through the appearance in Pre-Pottery Neolithic B of flint knapping on bipolar nuclei to produce fine regular blades, and the use of a flat lamellar retouch on blades, which, he says, takes them beyond the requirements of utility (2000: 243). Of the display of bull skulls, he writes: “These devices are obviously symbolic, for very little hunting of the wild bull itself took place” (238). Similarly, Bleda Düring’s (2001) careful analysis of the data on houses at Çatalhöyük shows a regular contrast between clean and dirty areas, an observation confirmed by micro analysis (see Matthews, Wiles, and Almond 2006). From this he draws the conclusion that these are respectively the “symbolically charged” and the domestic areas of



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the house. This pattern of diagnosis is widespread: in the absence of apparent utility, we must be in the presence of the symbolic. Given this definition of the symbolic, it typically follows, according to a distinction familiar in British social anthropology at least since Malinowski, that we are also likely to be in the presence of religion. Although by now it is a tired joke among archaeologists that any artifact whose use is not evident must be “ritual,” this way of defining religion retains its deep appeal. For example, it remains a central component of cognitive anthropologists’ definition of religion: as Harvey Whitehouse writes, “What both ritual and art have in common is their incorporation of elements that are superfluous to any practical aim and, thus, are irreducible to technical motivations” (2004: 3). There are a number of problems with the assumptions these approaches display. First, of course, is the sheer difficulty of accurately identifying a lack of utility. Just as the absence of proof cannot be taken as a proof of absence, so too the investigator’s inability to imagine a use for something may demonstrate nothing more than the limits of his or her imagination – or breadth of ethnographic knowledge. What could be more useless than the study of a “dead” language like Latin? But it is only useless if one does not, say, think it is the actual language of God, has magical powers, or, if one ignores the utility of the social status gained by conspicuous display – matters of semiotic ideology. Or, again, when Constantine placed the Christian labarum sign on his soldiers’ shields, it was not as a useless symbol: he was activating divine power. More important, however, is the effort to isolate “the symbolic” as a distinct domain within the range of empirical observations. This reproduces an invidious dichotomy, in which the symbolic stands apart from – and, by implication, is supplemental to – the truly useful, much as superstructure stood to infrastructure, in the old model. Yet an enduring insight of Sahlins is that the human activities cannot be separated into discrete symbolic and useful domains, for even hunting reflects cultural choices made on the basis of certain values. So we might turn back to Cauvin’s bull skulls: suppose they were displayed by people who regularly ate the animals, would that make their display any less symbolic? It is no doubt significant that the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük portrayed and displayed the skulls of animals they rarely hunted and that were not their primary sources of food. And this pattern does

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suggest that such animals were foci of particular kinds of attentiveness and interest. It does not follow from this that the display of bucrania is peculiarly symbolic in ways that the making of pottery, harvesting of lentils, or the marrying of cousins are not. Nor is this evidence that wild animals are somehow more symbolic than domesticated ones. People of Sumba, where I have lived (Keane 1997, 2007), can talk endlessly about the qualities of cattle and the wealth, powers in exchange relations, and thus, by hypothesis, ancestral blessings they manifest. This interest in itself makes them neither more nor less useful than deer, dogs, and chickens. This isolation of the symbolic from the instrumental has consequences for how one thinks of religion, as a priori a distinct sphere apart from supposedly everyday activity. I stress this point both because of the bearing it has on the specific problem of interpreting evidence for prehistoric religion, and because it reveals one set of consequences that follow from defining culture as a domain that manifests a principle of (relative) human freedom from natural determinism. If culture is defined as being the domain of social choices, in contrast to necessity, the domain of natural determinism, then things that seem to reflect a lack of necessity are, ipso facto, cultural. The cultural, in this pattern, is a general principle whose specific manifestations are those things called symbolic. To separate the archaeological evidence into things that are useful and those that are symbolic implies that the practical side of human activity is not symbolic. This point is important because other analytical consequences follow. The putative distinction between instrumental and symbolic is the basis on which most of the theories of religion in Çatalhöyük have been based. A second problematic feature of the common ways of talking about the symbolic follows from the first. If one identifies necessity with the material world of cause and effect, then it often follows that culture will be identified with immaterial ideas. To the extent that the symbolic is an autonomous domain and identifiable with a certain class of non-instrumental objects, then those objects themselves have a distinctive relationship to the world of thought and activity. That relationship is typically one of representation: the material object expresses, and is logically secondary to, the idea that gave rise to it. Carolyn Nakamura and Lynn Meskell (2006: 229) summarize the main principled objection to the very idea of representation in the context of archaeological artifacts quite well:



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The notion of representation entails a remove from the real, it depicts a likeness, rendition or perception rather than the immediacy of the object in question … By employing the notion of representation we infer that figurines stand in for something real and are a reflection of that reality, of someone or something. And yet these objects are not necessarily referent for something else tangible, but could be experienced as real and tangible things in themselves. The point does not just hold for the distant world of the Neolithic. As Hans Belting (1994) has argued, early Christian icons functioned to make divinity present, not to depict it; in India, the image of a god can be that gaze to which the worshipper makes himself or herself visible (Davis 1997, Pinney 2004; cf. Morgan 2005). And, in Alfred Gell’s (1998) view, many visual experiences function to dazzle or trap the viewer. Finally, some visual images, such as Navaho sand paintings or Walbiri drawings are best understood as the outcomes of the processes by which they were created, and eventually destroyed, rather than as things to be looked at. Even an image that is meant to be viewed by a spectator presupposes significant material conditions. To treat artifacts, or even pictures, as representations is to look beyond their fundamental materiality and all that makes it possible – from motor and cognitive skills to the availability of resources – and that follows from it.

Representations of Religion Despite the critique of representation, discussions of prehistoric religion at Çatalhöyük still tend to treat material objects as representing ideas, and reveal some of the analytical consequences. Cauvin, for instance, pays special attention to the bull horns embedded in the walls and to what he takes to be females carved in stone and moulded in clay. From these he concludes: “These two figures, the woman and the bull, were destined to represent the divine couple, the mother-goddess and bull-god, which were to persist in the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean from the Neolithic until the classic period” (2000: 238). There are good reasons to be wary of this reading and its bold leap across millennia. What I want to stress here is how the concept of representation induces Cauvin to see them as related, rather than saying anything about their form,

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means of production, location, or evidence of treatment. They form a complex because they are both representations. Much of his subsequent interpretation depends on this initial step of grouping them together as a complex. Cauvin takes the horns and figurines to stand for something other than themselves, a bull deity and goddess, respectively. In the case of figurines and paintings – but not that of horns embedded in walls – the basic phenomenology of human visual experience no doubt justifies a mimetic or iconic interpretation: there is at least resemblance to something else. Does iconicity, however, warrant the next step, to representation, and from there to concept? Without some access to the discursive regimentation and semiotic ideologies that guide any culture of image-making and -using, this step from object to idea is hard to justify. The representational approach to material evidence plays an especially important role in the major cognitivist interpretations of Çatalhöyük religion. This is perhaps not surprising, given the two foundational premises of this approach. One, already mentioned, is that religion, like art, is defined in opposition to practicality. The second is that religion consists primarily of beliefs. It follows from this that material objects, like practices, are derivative of those beliefs. The task, then, is how to get from the object to the belief. For Mithen (1998), this means taking the paintings of Çatalhöyük as directly mimetic depictions of beings that form the content of people’s beliefs. His analysis of certain images as metaphorical combinations of elements from different cognitive domains depends on the initial assumption that material things are expressions of ideas. A similar representational approach to the evidence from Çatalhöyük is given by Trevor Watkins (2004). He describes the transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic as a shift in balance between nature and culture, in which people “devised means of embodying abstract concepts, beliefs and ideas about themselves and their world in externalized, permanent forms” (97). In both cases, the special interest in cognition leads Mithen and Watkins to treat material things as evidence for immaterial concepts. There is certainly nothing wrong with this as an analytical strategy. Yet the temptation arises to treat them as substitutes for the discourses we lack, as if images were the texts that would speak to us from the silence of the objects around them. This becomes problematic when it also leads us to assume that things function in order to express concepts.



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Ideas leave material traces only to the extent they take the form of activities. This point is not merely a methodological scruple. It may be a more realistic way to think about even mental life, as it is lived within society. Once we try to look past the things, in our effort to get at ideas, their materiality ceases to be informative. Nevertheless, that materiality is crucial to their place within social life – just not as a determinant. It is as material things that pictures and figurines, houses and burials form contexts, have causes and effects, are publicly available to other people, have histories. These are characteristically left out of representational approaches. And it is here that a materialist semiotics might begin to look.

Wild Animals, Killers, and Meat Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

The period of the Neolithic in which Çatalhöyük thrived was at a tipping point in the processes of domestication. I do not mean this in the teleological sense that history has directionality, with the fallacy that results from assuming people in Çatalhöyük somehow knew where they were heading. Rather, the sense of a tipping point may have taken the form of people’s sharpened awareness of contrasts that they found interesting. In the local political economy, foraging was giving way to agriculture, and hunting to herding. The predominant faunal remains at Çatalhöyük come from domesticated animals like sheep and goats, and the implication is these were the primary sources of meat. Yet the buildings contain bucrania from wild bulls and depictions of bulls, deer, leopards, and equines. Moreover, there is evidence of occasional feasting on some (but not all) of these large wild animals. Taken together, this suggests that wild animals had some grip over people’s imagination. No doubt hunting held power over the imagination for Paleolithic hunters as well. What is important at Çatalhöyük is that it now formed a contrast to animals that are not hunted. After all, sheep and goats were also killed and eaten, so neither the fact of killing nor eating distinguishes the bulls and deer. In this semiotic economy, deer and bulls were not only

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things that humans kill and eat, they were also animals that were not domesticated. The wild and domesticated contrast seems not just to be an opposition that we, the observers, impose on the people of Çatalhöyük, but rather an approximation of a focus of attention and interest of their own that seems to be emerging from the material remains. Some observers take the remains of bulls and the depictions of leopards as evidence that violence played a central role in Çatalhöyük religion. The category of violence is excessively capacious, however, and encompasses everything from the excited sadism of bear baiter or lynch mob to the indifference of the butcher or the hitman. Those who obtain meat themselves rather than from the market, and those who have never formed relations with pets, may not see the killing of animals to be violence at all. Here I will draw, cautiously, on the slaughter of buffalo in contemporary Sumba, not as an analogy – there are far too many differences of context – but as a provocation to the imagination. First, unlike aurochs but like the sheep and goats of Çatalhöyük, Sumbanese buffalo are domesticated, and some myths suggest they are actually held in contempt for having surrendered their powers of speech along with their autonomy in return for the ease of life in the corral (Hoskins 1993). Second, Sumbanese buffalo killing takes place at the apex of a hierarchy of sacrificial value that also includes offerings of betel nut and the killing of chickens, pigs, and horses. It is a hierarchy that reflects a number of things, one of which is the kind of labour, the extent of kinship ties, and the powers of exchange relations that are concretized in the very existence of the animal in the first place (see Keane 1997, chapter 3). Third, what ritual specialists consider the most important elements of these sacrifices leave no material traces: the act is framed by spoken prayers, and the response of the spirits must be sought through divinatory reading of the entrails of the victim. When I lived on Sumba, chicken sacrifice was far more common than that of larger animals, but the act of killing chickens elicited little interest. The killing of small and weak animals not only lacks drama, it offers little opportunity for spectatorship. Buffalo slaughter, on the other hand, is a hugely popular spectacle. It takes place in the village plaza, and everyone who is able to watch does so with great enthusiasm. What is that enthusiasm about? To start, there is a certain thrill in the sheer display of wealth and its expenditure.



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The killing produces huge quantities of meat, which people anticipate with enormous relish. Many spectators focus on the bravado of the young men who undertake the killing, and the risk at which this places them. And people seem to find the fatal blow of the machete and the struggles of the buffalo to be fascinating. What do Sumbanese see in the spectacle? Power, domination, fear, the display of athleticism, identification with or a vast sense of distance from the victim, sadism or empathy, excitement at the dramatic movements, and amusement at the occasional slapstick may all be involved. Janet Hoskins points out that Sumbanese often laugh at the sight of the slaughter. She says this is a nervous response to their ambivalence and suggests they are identifying with the animal but also ridiculing it for allowing them to humiliate it. In her view, the killing works in part to externalize aspects of themselves that they want to eliminate. The slaughter of buffalo also results in their internalization as meat. Sumbanese love to eat meat, but do so only at ceremonial feasts. These bodily pleasures are inseparable from the giving and receiving they presuppose, the commensality and reciprocity. Confronted with evidence of killing, we cannot be sure that violence is the principal focus of attention, or even fear and pain, sadism or empathy. It may also be mere excitement, in which the spectacle of killing is inseparable from the stimulation of being in a crowd – even a Durkheimian collective effervescence – and the anticipation of the feast. So if Sumbanese objectify themselves in the form of the sacrificial animal, they also absorb that objectified beast into themselves in the form of dead flesh. They internalize the meat that results, and they are very aware of the pleasures of satiety and renewed vigour this produces. The dead body of the animal becomes part of the revitalized living body of the feasters; the animal rendered an object of human actions contributes to their constitution as subjects both through the agency by which they kill the beast and through the act of consumption by which they appropriate it to themselves. Perhaps what we can say is this is a kind of objectification, an externalization of an aspect of oneself, at the same time that it is a subjectification of the object world. The objectification process leaves traces not just in the bodies of the eater, but in their houses. Thus the mandibles and horns are indexical icons of accumulated events of feasting (Keane 1997; see

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also Adams 2005, Hodder 2005). It is important to observe the complementary distribution between representations and the major sources of food. Sheep and goats may be good to eat but they are not good to display. They are the essential objectification of human agency, and yet they do not stand for it in the most marked contexts. It may not just be the danger and violence of wild animals that is interesting about them, but the way in which they live at the very edges of human control: we can kill them, yet nothing is guaranteed. The fully domesticated animal, on the other hand, is too thoroughly subjected. The house bears the marks of certain killings, those of bulls, and not others. Faced with such ethnographic comparisons, which of course could be multiplied endlessly, we can’t be sure of the meaning of violence, or indeed, if violence really is the point (see Bloch 1992). We have evidence that people at Çatalhöyük were interested in wild animals. We can surmise it is the wildness of leopards, bulls, and deer, in contrast to the domesticated herds that intrigued them. We have evidence of feasting, and perhaps the spectacle of killing. In the latter, however, we cannot know if the dominant key is fear, pain, prowess, sadism, domination, the thrill of the crowd, and/or the pleasures of the feast. The category of “violence” is both too general and too narrow. There is yet another aspect of killing to consider as well. As Valerio Valeri (1985) observed, killing dramatizes the ubiquitous experience of transformation or transition from presence to absence, writing that “sacrificial death and destruction are also images; they represent the passage from the visible to the invisible and thereby make it possible to conceive the transformations the sacrifice is supposed to produce” (69). This is borne out in the case of Sumbanese killing, which is meant as a bridge to the invisible world. Sacrificial animals convey messages between the manifest world of the living and the invisible world of the dead. In Sumba, sacrificial killing must always include words, and the reading of entrails. These foreground the fact that the killing is a transition between perceptible and imperceptible worlds (see Keane 2009). Forms of communication such as these would leave no archaeological traces. Nevertheless, the evidence at Çatalhöyük suggests people had some interest in the play of visible and invisible, presence and absence. This, at least, is one way of thinking about the mandibles hidden in the walls, the plastering over of paintings, and the corpses



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interred in the benches, invisible presences of which it is reasonable to assume at least some people were aware. Perhaps we do not have to decide which aspect of killing feasting is the key one. These aspects are all bundled together (see Keane 2003). All components of this bundle of features (wealth, social power, domination over the wild, youthful folly, masculine bravado, plentitude and the feelings of meaty satiation, aggression, fear, transition from visible to invisible, from living animal to dead meat, and incorporation of edible object into vital subject) are in principle available for attention, elaboration, and development. Different components of this bundle may come into play in different circumstances; some that were only latent in one context may become prominent in another.

Toward a Materialist Semiotic Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

It may well be that all human worlds require the imagining of entities and even agents that lie beyond perceptible experience – the mere existence of kinship systems already seems to require relations with people at a distance from one’s immediate sensory range, and usually, with dead and future generations (see Kopytoff 1971). This does not, however, require a leap into transcendentalizing faiths; nor does it give us licence to imagine any society ever lived in some simple mystical unity with the spirit world. Rather, we should expect to find marked and unmarked components of existence, some subject to greater attention, circumspection, and discursive elaboration than others. Near the more marked end of this continuum, the conditions for the exercise of people’s powers and social relations come to the foreground, objectified as the outcome of the processes by which they have been materialized. In objectified form, human and animal (and whatever other kinds of agency might be taken to exist) take public form, available for people’s perceptions and subject to their moral evaluations. In such marked and unmarked distinctions as that between domesticated and wild, unelaborated house and elaborated, seem to indicate where we will find hierarchies of value, and there may be where the projects or fears that give content to

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what we like to call “religion” are to be found. If this sounds like a call to return to structuralist oppositions, there is an important difference: these are not merely thought worlds alone and they are not expressed through arbitrary signs. The conditions of materiality play a crucial role in their meaning, social consequences, and historical character. I began by asking what might allow cultural anthropologists to think comparatively and, in particular, to restore the perspective afforded by the encounter with deep time. It will not come simply from reviving the old categories on which comparison once rested. These have been laid low not just by political critique but by the more abstract thesis that the social formations are products of choices and are therefore irreducibly historical and particular in character. Yet if the result is to conclude we can seek no more than local knowledge, we lose a vital perspective. One response has been the effort to revive universals of thought. One of the most self-confident of these revivals is the new evolutionism in cognitive anthropology. This is not the place to address this approach; I do, however, want here to consider one problem it faces, that of material evidence. For archaeologists, of course, the silence of things makes a virtue of the necessary focus on materiality. Moreover, such a focus can be useful on more general grounds. The argument between determinism and cultural choice in the 1960s and 1970s tended to reproduce a dichotomy between materialism and idealism. One result was that materiality came to be identified with reductive determinism. To the extent that culture was identified with ideas, the material dimensions of social existence were commonly treated as not much more than expressions of those immaterial concepts and categories. This was reinforced within the structuralist tradition by the doctrine of the arbitrariness of the sign: nothing about the material qualities of cultural signs, or the causal circumstances in which we find them, contributed to their meaning apart from their capacity to distinguish one sign from another. Materiality was identified with the domain of necessity, ideas with that of freedom. Although the debates have moved on, these dichotomous tendencies persist. A materialist semiotics places signs within the material world – not, however, by restoring determinism (for the use of semiotics in archaeology, see Preucel 2006). To understand this, consider the idea of indexicality. Most archaeological evidence is indexical in character. That means we understand it with reference to an actual



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world of causes and effects. Ashes are indexical of ancient fires, scarred faunal remains of ancient slaughters. Indexicality has two important distinctive characteristics. In the first place, using the language of Peircean semiotics, it is a “Second.” That means, in itself, an index is evidence of something that actually happened. It is neither a mere possibility (as a picture can resemble a non-existent creature like a unicorn) nor a rule (as a spoken sentence is one instance of an indefinitely repeatable linguistic structure). Any given index is a singularity: these ashes index the particular fire that produced them. The second characteristic of indexicality follows from this: indexes are underdetermined for significance. An index cannot in itself specify what it is indexical of. That requires some further inference. To the extent those inferences are coherent and repeatable across instances, relatively predictable, this is because they are organized by a meta-level of semiosis, a Third, that is, a rule for interpreting them. Commonly this meta-indexical framing of indexical signs is found in discourse: but prehistorical materials lack evidence of discourse. One result of the lack of meta-level guidance to indexical evidence is that it is very difficult to determine the difference between the contingent outcomes of actions and the goals of actions. It is common to interpret the visual experience of the wall paintings in Çatalhöyük as being a purpose of the painters’ activities. The assumption is that their creators were producing images so that they could be seen later. Yet this is not necessarily the case. We know from examples such as Navaho sand painting (Newcomb and Reichard 1937) and various kinds of Aboriginal design (Munn 1973) that the process of making the image may be the point, and the resulting image may quickly be destroyed. In Çatalhöyük, the paintings may have been plastered over, and the handprints might be the results of some activity in which painted hands are placed on the wall. If we cannot know for sure whether the evidence is indexical of a purpose, what can we know? First, indexicals are socially significant if they are produced in relation to Thirds of some sort. The most obvious example is sinsigns of a legisign, that is, tokens of types, such as linguistic signs (a word, as a singular, concrete, utterance – what I hear in a given moment of speech – instantiates an abstract linguistic entity). Since a Third is virtual, a rule for use, the task is to seek evidence for a rule. Yet in a sense we needn’t seek out the cognitive correlates: we can seek the kinds of repetition that

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seem to treat indexicals as knowable – not to us, but to those who respond to them in further acts. Here the multi-generational pattern of floor plastering and figurine production at Çatalhöyük may be much more significant than dramatic but singular artifacts like the famous “mother goddess” statue. In seeking out repetition, however, we should not imagine we are finding the instantiation of a rule. As Wittgenstein (1953) pointed out long ago, the idea of following a rule poses extraordinary difficulties – a point that Bourdieu (1977), among others, elaborated for ethnographic analysis. Systems of legisigns may perhaps be better understood as emergent modes of reflection upon specific, perceptible events. The reflections offer retrospective abductions that take actual events to have been, after all, sinsigns, that is, instances of what are only in hindsight seen as their governing principles. (This, I think, is one way to generalize Marshall Sahlins’s arguments in Islands of History.) Second, of any evidence we should seek out the conditions for the possibility of producing it. As Hodder (2006: 60) points out, to plaster the walls of a house required marl extraction plots, tools for digging, containers to carry the mud, and some kind of division of labour and allocation of time. Somewhat more speculatively he surmises the latter conditions would also have meant ways of gathering and organizing people, feasts, and the killing of animals. Hodder calls this “a network of entanglement.” One important aspect of this is that material entanglements produce and are produced by social ones. Although the usual view of the social division of labour is that it makes people depend on one another, we might also see the material artifacts this labour involves as making possible a distribution of agency across a social field. The materialization of human activity makes it public and extends the activities of some people into those of others. Religious activity just like any other enters into the experiences of other people first by virtue of its materiality. People do not have direct access to ideas, but to words, actions, and things. They respond to these material mediations not just by decoding them to get at ideas, but also realize the possibilities they afford in all sorts of ways. They recognize something in their material circumstances, yet given the excess of qualitative and practical possibilities those circumstances afford, what they recognize is underdetermined. To draw on examples closer to home: what was heartfelt prayer for Aquinas became monstrous babble to Luther; a devotional offering by Bach is high art to most modern audiences (see Keane 2007).



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The material outcomes of people’s activities make it possible for other people to treat them as indexical, drawing inferences about what made them possible. If people do in fact draw such inferences (and whether and how they do so is a matter of particular semiotic ideologies), the material objects enter into semiotic economy, and with the result that their meaningfulness is part of a causal logic. For instance, the presence of plastered walls allows the inference that people had been organized to do the work, just as the presence of bucrania might index past feasts and that of fine obsidian access to distant resources. It is important, however, to observe that such potential interpretations are not necessarily ever realized; nor are they necessarily any guide for future actions. The conditions of possibility are only conditions, not goals. And, as Sahlins warned long ago, there is no reason to assume they are based on some particular set of utilitarian judgments or practical reasons that would be obvious to us. We must be wary of the pressure to teleological thinking. The hunt cannot be quite the same when there are also domesticated herds, neither at the level of meaning (because now hunting stands in conceptual contrast to herding) nor practice (time and energy spent hunting could have been used for making pots, flaking obsidian, cultivating fields, telling myths, negotiating marriages, and so forth). The outcome of the hunt objectifies these possibilities. That does not necessarily mean that objectification is in itself meaningful, in the sense that it gives rise to concepts. But once objectified, an activity or artifact is available for meaningfulness and for moral evaluation, as an object for an acting and thinking subject. A more useful distinction than that between symbolic and practical or material would be that among degrees of markedness of attention: objectification is one way to mark out certain parts of experience for special attention, vis-à-vis its relationship to human subjectivity and agency. Artifacts are potentially indexical since they bear the traces of the actions of those who made them. Confronted with those artifacts, people may not necessarily recognize that agency, or take it to be interesting. Conversely, they may also impute agency to objects we might consider “natural” in origin – rocks may speak, for instance (Urban 1996). Nevertheless, to the extent that they do draw inferences about agency from the artifacts around them, those objects are indispensable media by which agency comes to be dispersed or distributed, and thus, by which discrete actions in the past may become part of social worlds in the present. This may be

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the case for a house, a wall painting, even a herd of domesticated sheep, and it holds true regardless of either explicit meanings or their apparent utility. A materialist semiotics seeks out the logical-causal nexus behind objectification, and not just the causes or effects, mental or sociological, of that nexus. That means taking causality as one possible but not necessary source of the potential meaningfulness of the objectification. A materialist semiotics does not assume that any particular social arrangement is either caused by or leads to any particular set of material circumstances. It does, however, take seriously two aspects of the materiality of social life. First, all social action is mediated in some material form and is therefore subject to causality, to unintended consequences, to history. Second, all human experience is in part a response to the experience of material forms that, at least since the Neolithic, were created by previous human actions, which form part of their context: however private the initial impulse behind an action, its materiality gives it an inevitably social character. If cultural life entails choices, and those choices are primarily conceptual in nature, then our access to the deep past will be extremely limited. If, however, those choices always take material form, respond to material contexts, and open up new material possibilities, then they enter into causal worlds in ways that may allow us some purchase on them as elements of causal logics. Local knowledge is not just a system of conceptual categories; it is also a way into the nexus of causes and logics whose particular conjunctions are never generalizable – for one thing, they remain subject to both retrospective abductions and the prospective cast of human projects – yet whose materiality opens up the possibility for comparison across cases. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Ian Hodder for inviting me to join the Templeton Çatalhöyük project, to Maurice Bloch, Lynn Meskell, Peter Pels, Andrew Shryock, Leron Shults, Harvey Whitehouse, and Norm Yoffee for their input, and especially to Marshall Sahlins for encouraging anthropologists to think big. Parts of this essay appeared in different form in Keane (2010).

4 From Jew to Roman: Mr Joske, Mr Brewster, The Hill Tribes of Fiji, and the Hill Tribes of Fiji Martha Kaplan Primary Sources. Many of the main authorities are also significant actors in the events they relate, in one way or another authorized to represent the structures in play … [A]t least as important as the supposed “biases” introduced by the particular interests of the journalists is the fact that their interests and biases are constitutive of what they are talking about. For an ethnographic history, the so-called distortions of firsthand observers and participants are more usefully taken as values than as errors. They represent the cultural forces in play. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu

Most scholars of Fiji are familiar with Adolph Brewster Joske, British colonial official, amateur anthropologist, and memoirist, through his books The Hill Tribes of Fiji and The King of the Cannibal Isles, books published in 1922 and 1937, respectively. By the time he published these works, he had retired to England (in 1910) and changed his name to A.B. Brewster. Some Fiji scholars have also read his copious administrative correspondence and reports, held at the Fiji National Archives and the Fiji Museum. For information on the cultural lives and political fortunes of the people of the highlands of Viti Levu, Fiji, The Hill Tribes, in particular, is an invaluable source. It is also, as Marshall Sahlins (Kirch and Sahlins 1992) reminds us, a source on

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the cultural lives and ambitions of Victorian colonial officials, and a guide to the cultural forces in play. This essay on Mr Joske and the hill tribes of Viti Levu, Fiji, moves between an analysis of his ethnography and memoir as colonial discourse and an analysis of the Fijian history-making into which his colonial project fell. We will see Mr Joske as an agent of colonial power and as a complex person enmeshed in colonial contradictions of Fiji and beyond. We will meet his most interesting Fijian contemporary and foil, Mosese Dukumoi (also known as Navosavakadua), the prophet leader of many of the hill tribes. To do this, we will read Mr Joske’s The Hill Tribes of Fiji in two ways: first, as a text of its time, which tells us much about Mr Joske, colonial Fiji, and the global British Empire; and, second, as a source of information about the hill tribes of Fiji, one among many sources about a dynamic history of hinterland Fijians in the era of Navosavakadua. From the work of Marshall Sahlins this consideration of the force of Mr Joske’s texts in the midst of Fijian colonial history draws its focus on the relation of culture, historicity, and power. When anthropology took a historical turn in the 1970s and 1980s, we can see three quite distinct senses of what history meant for the study of culture and what culture meant for the study of power. For world system theorists, led by Eric Wolf, culture required to be contextualized analytically within regional and global inter-relations, especially of European colonialism and capitalism. The dynamism of the situation was political-economic, whether involving the largely European structures of colonialism and exploitation or the local forms of resistance. Culture was situated within power, not the source of it, and power and history-making were understood in political-economic terms. In a more nuanced way, for anthropologists of colonial discourse, from Talal Asad (1974) to Bernard Cohn (1987, 1996) the goal was to denaturalize and analyze colonial projects, finding the powers in their discursive forms. In the work of Sahlins, however, the historical turn was to show the power and history in all cultures. Sahlins’s historical anthropology focuses especially on non-Western histories, the historical agencies of imagined cold societies, to consider the way culture(s) make histories. He locates power in all culture (all cultures), but does not specify in advance the forms that power may take, nor the circumstances that may evoke it. This essay does not seek to illustrate different historicities of British and Fijian structures. It does seek to illustrate two culturally contextualized



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individual histories: histories of two self-understood lawgivers in the hills of Fiji at the end of the nineteenth century. Taking The Hill Tribes as colonial text we can read it as a chronicle of colonial self- transformation. It is by now a truism to observe of colonial societies that colonial elites are not necessarily the elites of the metropole. In Fiji at the turn of the century, A.B. Joske transformed himself from merchant of dubious background to pillar of Empire, from Adolph Brewster Joske to A.B. Brewster, what I would partly playfully describe as a self-transformation from Jew to Roman. His media were written narratives and imagery: official minute papers, amateur anthropological texts, and photographs. His portrayal of Fijians was detailed, curious, and often empathetic, but to image his self as staunch colonial, he needed contrasting images of disorderly Fijian and Indian others. He created vivid portraits with word and camera of dark bilious charlatan prophets, fisher maidens, cannibal kings, excellent cooks, and of himself as Commissioner and Magistrate. An extremely self-conscious lawgiver, Joske/ Brewster used Fijians (and occasionally Indians) and the spectre of their disorder to transform his own colonial social identity. Crucial to the effects of his gaze, both on himself and on the Fijians, was the audience receiving his report: other Fiji whites and the British at home. Joske could gaze, but not just as he pleased. Thinking about the hill tribes of Fiji as they made history in terms their own and new, given, and innovative, we can consider other selftransformations ongoing. When Mr Joske arrived in Fiji and in the hills of Viti Levu, he arrived into a complex cosmological and historical social landscape. As Sahlins has shown (1985a), nineteenthcentury Fijian culture was organized, pervasively, by an opposition between socio-cosmological principles of sea and land. Founding chiefs were understood culturally as sea people, originally strangerkings who married women of the land, founding the lines of chiefs of the great coastal kingdoms. Ritual experts and commoners were constructed culturally as people of the land. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the coasts of Viti Levu and in the Fijian islands to the east, Fiji was organized in hierarchical chiefly-led kingdoms that were in constant relations of alliance, exchange, and contest with each other and with the kingdom of Tonga to the east. The social acts of chiefs became total social facts of a particular (heroic history) kind, not merely charismatic or providers of “models for” the behaviour of followers, but directly constitutive of the relations

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of their polity. If a Bauan chief married into the lineage of Rewa, for example, then his whole polity was related to Rewa with implications from exchange rights to military duties (and of course the histories of actual kinship set the likelihood, though not the inevitability, of such a marriage in the first place). From the 1840s on, Christian missionaries and early white settlers brought their own projects, but were integrated into chiefly-political aims. By 1854, Fiji became Christian (or at least coastal Fiji and the islands became Christian) when Cakobau of the powerful kingdom of Bau converted (Sahlins 1985a: 37). By the time of cession to Britain in 1874, Cakobau was acknowledged by most coastal Fijians and by white observers as the king of Fiji. He and fourteen other chiefs signed the Deed of Cession that made Fiji a British colony. Chiefs made history in Fiji, through the process Sahlins has called heroic history. But the hill peoples of Viti Levu were quintessential people of the land. They organized themselves differently, into relatively smaller, far less hierarchical polities (Kaplan 1995). Most importantly, those in Viti Levu island’s North East understood themselves in relation to their construction of the place where they lived: in and adjacent to the Nakauvadra Mountain Range, home of extraordinarily powerful Fijian ancestor gods. Indeed, we know of this in part because of Mr Joske’s Hill Tribes. The hill people were the pre-eminent “people of the land” more often led by oracle priests and invulnerable warriors than by chiefs (Kaplan 1990a, 1990b, 1995). It is Mr Joske who describes practices such as “luveniwai,” an invulnerability ritual led by ritual officiants, and later “Tuka” practices offering immortality to its warrior adherents. Most importantly in Mr Joske’s era, the “Tuka” leader, a man called Mosese Dukumoi, also known as Navosavakadua, linked Fijian gods with Christian Old and New Testament versions of God (hence the biblical name of “Mosese”) to authorize his leadership of a new form of Fijian polity. Colonial texts such as Mr Joske’s administrative and ethnographic writings, reified Navosavakadua’s “Tuka movement,” as it became known and as they sought to suppress it, never recognizing its basis in the authority of people of the land. In this complex era, Navosavakadua was a Fijian lawgiver challenging new Christian, colonial, and coastal Fijian forms of order. He was, throughout, Mr Joske’s bête noire. In this chapter we will read Mr Joske’s texts as if looking over his shoulder, to envision aspects of the culture of the Fijians he describes, and we will also read them to get at the categories in the



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cosmology of an amiable imperialist. But there’s more to it still. Mr Joske’s texts don’t just express a world created full. They are the very way in which he made his world full. So, this is a story about Mr Joske’s life and writings that focuses on the making of a colonial self, where writing was a crucial activity.1 Mr Joske was in some ways a man in a world furnished by Kipling, but he was also a man seeking to set his place in that world by participating in its construction. He found, as we shall see, “good language” (Dening 1992) via Kipling that helped him to make his place in Victorian Fiji. Thus, we contrast Mr Joske’s agency on the periphery of the British Empire with that on the periphery of Fiji’s heroic history that Joske (as Brewster) so vividly (if sometimes opaquely) chronicled. Thereby we will understand a bit more about powers, specifically powers of agency, enabled by particular kinds of authorship with entailed forms of authority and position in British colonial culture. In this sense we can see Mr Joske’s life as a self-transformation from Jew to Roman, enacted through the imaging of otherness. And at the same time, if we are to use Mr Joske’s writing to look over his shoulder, then we can work to see more than he himself saw, we can work to see Sahlins’s “cultural forces in play.” Thus, this is a study that also thinks about how Mr Joske’s self-fashioning met a certain Fijian leader’s self-fashioning in the hills of Viti Levu. I have come to appreciate the ways in which Mr Joske’s “interests and biases are constitutive of what he is talking about” (Kirch and Sahlins 1992: 4). As his biography intersects with that of the Fijian prophet-leader Navosavakadua, the Victorian and Fijian cultural forces in play will generate a remade Mr Brewster, an enduringly famous Fijian prophet, and in the cultural conjunction between them, including relations and refractions of perception that contingently connect them, an ethnographic and historical reification of danger and disaffection in the hills of Viti Levu that will endure in Fijian experience, colonial law, and scholarly analysis.

Mr Joske’s World Created Full My first working title for this essay was “Mr Joske’s World Created Full.” I borrowed the term “world created full” from Michael Ryan (1981: 532) who tells us of sixteenth-century Europeans, encountering exotic others in the New World, who did not believe that they were discovering unknown lands and new cultures, but thought

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instead that they were confirming the existence of places and peoples already known from the Bible, existing in the Christian God’s world created full. In the case of A.B. Joske, it seemed to me that his texts situated Fiji in an empire already furnished. On the one hand, Mr Joske’s Fiji is often simply furnished by Kipling. Kipling is quoted for the first time (of dozens of citations in this work) on page 45 of The Hill Tribes, as Joske describes the flame-coloured flowering myrtle on the slopes of Mount Victoria, behind Nadarivatu, where he was stationed. “Their kindred grow, also in New Zealand, of which the omniscient Kipling sings in his Ballad of the Flowers … of the blood red myrtle-bloom.” “Never, to my knowledge,” Joske writes, “did the poet visit Fiji, yet the above is a perfect description.” However, it is not Kipling’s landscape that Joske uses most often, but rather Kipling’s characters and characterizations. And especially it is the Kipling of Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies that Joske brings to his writing of Fiji. Here Fiji is a place of rural customs, odd folk practices like “luveniwai” which intertwines spirits and people, layers of folk belief persisting under incoming governmental and religious transformations. Here he echoes the Kipling who wrote of a Britain constituted by waves of conquest, small dark folk succeeded by lighter larger conquerors, some of them Roman. This waves-of-conquest imagery resonates with nineteenth-century imaginations of the peopling of the Pacific. On the other hand, beyond Kipling, Mr Joske’s Fiji was furnished by touchstones and colonial tropes from other colonies, especially India. Thus, for example, the early chapters in The Hill Tribes recount the 1867 journey of the missionary Thomas Baker into the inland hills of Viti Levu, pursued and preceded by a whale’s tooth (“tabua”), a valuable sent by a chief who desired Baker’s death. Later, Joske writes of similar tabuas, sent out by Navosavakadua and his followers in the Tuka movement, to recruit allies. He compares them to the sinister chuppaties of the “Mutiny” in India in 1847. (A wider-ranging colonial story from India imagined communication and recruitment among plotting mutineers via chupatties [griddle baked breads], laid on doorsteps.2) Joske shared in a web of colonial interaction and images, from a globe of imperial interrelation brought to Fiji as well as developed there. In The King of the Cannibal Islands, he wrote: “The first night I used [the mosquito net] the comfort was so great that I could not sleep. I was not selfish or inhospitable, as I shared it with an old veteran of the Indian



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Mutiny (as it was large and roomy) and he kept me awake by yarns of his adventures in that great catastrophe” (Brewster 1937: 130). From Joske’s account of a shared mosquito net, we get a sense of one of the webs of connections and transmissions in Empire. Every colonial officer he names went on from Fiji to another colony. Every settler who came to Fiji had a history, and a connection to somewhere else. Of course written words moved around the globe (colonial correspondence, for example, or Joske’s own volumes), but a hodgepodge of individuals also personally created the connections, enabling a shared imagination to be made real. Certainly in Joske’s texts, Fijians are conflated with the British Empire’s other “others,” internal and external. They are likened to Scottish highlanders: in Hill Tribes one picture of eleven Fijian men is captioned “fijian armed native constabulary in sulu or kilts. The contingent at King Edward’s Coronation were for a few days with the Gordons at Aberdeen, whom they regarded as kai vata, or relations, on account of the kilt.” Perhaps it was the Fijians’ idea to see the similarities. On the other hand, the assimilation of Fijian hill tribes to Scottish highlanders pervades Joske’s work, and that of first colonial governor, Sir Arthur Gordon. Here these hill people are also like the characters described by Kipling: “The men only wore a strip of malo or bark cloth, passed between their legs and fastened round the waist like a sash. This get-up very much resembled that of the immortal [sic], ‘not very much before and rather less than half of that behind.’” (Brewster 1937: 25). I wish I could more fully reproduce the playfulness of Joske/Brewster, as we consider the seriousness of that playfulness and its purposes, effectiveness, and effects in Joske’s life, and in the lives of the hill peoples of Fiji. In this passage in Hill Tribes, Kipling’s fictional “native” is not identified as Kipling’s fiction – is it that he has such reality in the imperial world created full? Or is it that Joske is writing the Fijians as Kipling wrote Gunga Din?

Mr Joske and Mr Brewster: From Jew to Roman A quick chronology: Adolph Brewster Joske spent about forty years in Fiji. He was born in Melbourne, Australia. In 1870, at age sixteen, just returned to Melbourne from school in England he helped his father in his business (1937: 63), and then he came to Fiji with the

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first batch of settlers who founded Suva, later Fiji’s capital. Many of these initial white settlers hoped to plant cotton to replace supplies diminished during the American Civil War. They came under the aegis of the Polynesia Company of Melbourne, a joint stock company that “hoped to become a humble imitation of the Honourable East India Company” (18). The Polynesia Company had given Cakobau of Bau, later “King Cakobau” 10,000 pounds to pay off a debt demanded by the United States for damages to property of US citizens in Fiji by some of Cakobau’s subjects. In return, Cakobau gave the Polynesia Company a charter and promised them land in several parts of Fiji. Some of the land Cakobau promised he did not fully control, and he was not able to make good on some of these promises. Joske claimed several lots in Suva itself. Joske’s father, Paul Joske, arriving in Fiji in 1871, joined another merchant to establish the firm of Brewer and Joske. The firm “opened business as merchants and bankers, built a cotton-ginning mill and bought cotton in the seed from the planters, or shipped it on their account” (154). They also issued banknotes. In 1873 Paul Joske, whom his son describes as “a very vigorous, enterprising man,” built the first sugar mill in Fiji (86, 219). In 1884 A.B. Joske joined the Fiji Civil Service. He was Deputy Commandant of the Armed Native Constabulary, Assistant to Resident Commissioner Walter Carew, Stipendiary Magistrate, and later Resident Commissioner in Colo. He married in 1902. Joske retired from the Colonial Service in Fiji in 1910 and went to live in Torquay, England – he calls this his “return to England.” He died in late 1937 (The Times 1937: 16). Joske’s father was described by a later colonial officer, Philip Snow (1997: 84), as “a pioneering German Jewish merchant, Paul Joske.” Setariki Tuinaceva, late archivist of Fiji’s National Archives, once gossiped to me about A.B. Joske: “He was a Jew, you know” (personal communication, 1984). Joske’s books, published in his later years, give no hint of this affiliation. Here is how he introduces himself in The King of the Cannibal Isles: “Already some young Melbourne men had started [cotton] plantations in Fiji … I too was Melbourne born, and had just retuned from school in England, in my sixteenth year. My father, instead of sending me peremptorily to the Church of England Grammar School, where three of my brothers were, allowed me to try to help in his business, saying at the same time that, were I but of age, he would send me to Fiji to plant cotton. Oh how my spirit longed that that might come to pass” (1937: 63).



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In numerous passages, often with awkward narrative results, Joske links his family to Christian institutions and identifies himself as Christian. Often he does this by way of opposing self and other. In The Hill Tribes of Fiji he compares Fijian rituals for adolescent boys and the Jewish ritual of bar mitzvah, describing both as “somewhat equivalent to our confirmation” (1922: 177–8). In The King of the Cannibal Isles he tells an anecdote about a group of settlers “amongst them a member of the Semitic race” (1937: 191) who turned out to be fleeing a debt. Joske’s language “others” this man, in a complete and utter contrast to his later use of a cozy, white colonial “we.” Of course histories of Jews are full of intermarriages, assimilations, refusals, and denials. And by Jewish law, children inherit Jewishness through their mothers, not fathers. No matter how we look at it, Joske was not, in his own sense of self, a Jew. He shunned the connection. But because others in Fiji raised it, in what I am sure was often denigratory gossip, Joske worked to escape it. This escape can be charted in Joske’s colonial service, in his literal geographical movement, and in the tropes of minute papers and memoirs. In the course of his time in Fiji he moved from being a merchant and planter to being a colonial official, in the course of his life he moved from Melbourne, to Fiji, to retirement in Torquay. And in retirement, due perhaps to anti-German sentiment during the First World War, he changed his name from Joske to Brewster. In his lifetime, he worked very hard to transform himself from (perceived) Jew to Roman, from a merchant far from home, Germannamed and of uncertain, not top-drawer Australian background into an English-named official and chronicler of an imperial project: From a member of a class of whites who were destined to fail in a Fiji organized by an aristocratic colonial administration and the administration’s sugar-growing monopoly, to a member of the administration itself. From a man called “flabby” in aristocratic governor Sir Arthur Gordon’s first impression, as he summed up the Fiji whites and predicted their economic collapse, to a man who made colonial law real as he sat in a magistrate’s court, and who created almost indelible versions of Fiji’s history in his writings. From an off-white white (in the sense that Sander Gilman argues that in the European imagination class and “race” otherness have often been assimilated to each other, and to the ostensible physical otherness of Jews), to a pith helmet–wearing white, a Victorian imperial British white. None of this was possible without the mediation of otherness, the otherness of Fijian and Fiji Indian disorder.

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Gazing at Fijians Long before I started to think seriously about Mr Joske, I always used to wonder about the frontispiece photo to The Hill Tribes of Fiji. Why is the first picture in the book one of a Fisher Maiden, looking longingly out to sea for her lover? The Hill Tribes live inland. They can’t gaze out to sea. The logic of the picture comes not from Fijian ethnography but from British readers’ expectation: the portrayal of an unclothed “Native” woman at the beginning of the book. The colonial gaze is patriarchal, it’s here also commoditizing. Mr Joske didn’t take this picture. The photo credit is to J.H. Waters, Suva. It is one of what was clearly a set of carefully posed portraits of Fijian types. Another photo by J.H. Waters included in the book (there are several more) is of “A Cannibal Hill Warrior.” The posed pictures by J.H. Waters are much prettier than Mr Joske’s own grainy photos, and those by others such as Sir John Bates Thurston, also included scattered throughout the text. But what the out-of-place coastal fisher maiden reminds us is that The Hill Tribes is not simply the product of Mr Joske’s gaze on the Fijians. It is a gaze to be shared. There is an audience for the book in mind. It was an audience who shared a colonial literary world. They knew the immortal Gunga Din already, were charmed that Fijians should recognize kinship with Scottish highlanders, and were interested in unclothed fisher maidens, but in an ethnographic context. Writing to this audience Mr Joske offered authenticity of knowledge and a look over his shoulder. Inviting others to gaze with him, he could not himself be the object of scrutiny – though he could be the self-deprecating object of admiration as he muddled through. Thus, on a typical page from The Hill Tribes (note how Kipling, yarns from India, and Roman magistrates intermingle in a few artless paragraphs), Joske ruefully describes his official attempts to get Fijian women to feed their infants cow’s milk, in baby bottles (a pet scheme of one of Fiji’s governors): Whatever [the idiosyncrasy] was, the district officers had to play up to it, as Fiji used to be a Crown Colony of a severe type which meant that His Excellency was a bit of an autocrat and it was best for one to understand his bent, if possible. Incidentally, I would add, we were miserable failures over the feeding bottles. The women always declared they would never use them, and they



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didn’t. Kipling says somewhere that in India the people always say that all the sahibs are mad, only some are madder than others. That opinion is fully shared by the Fijians and I do not wonder at it … The Resident Commissioner [Joske’s superior, Walter Carew] used to remark that Cicero had said that magistrates ought to be men of leisure. Speaking for myself, life was one continual state of toil and emergency, and having to find instant remedies for every conceivable kind of contingency, reminding me of the Hindu railway official in charge of a lonely jungle who, finding a tiger on the premises one day, bolted himself into his office and telegraphed to headquarters: “Tiger on platform; please arrange.” There were always tigers about in my district, for which I had to arrange. (1922: 55) Some of Mr Joske’s imagery is engagingly self-deprecating, playfully challenging colonial autocrats, and sympathizing with Fijians. Some of it, however, is far more immediately disturbing, denying shared sympathy with Fijians, narrating a white observer of black peoples’ foibles, capacities, or crimes. This latter sort especially plays off of the deeper ethnic, racial, and temporal template. Like many other colonial narrators in Fiji, Joske tells the story of the transformation of Fijians with black souls to salvation and light through Christian conversion and its visible signs: the covering of nakedness, the shearing of hair. Last to be converted, well into the 1870s the dark putatively “Melanesian” peoples of the interior were to Joske, as well as to many other settlers and administrators, “fuzzy wuzzies” – among other epithets, until they accepted religion and the Queen’s Rule.

Excellent Cooks Most of Mr Joske’s work as magistrate was spent on cases arising among indentured Indians in Fiji – but most of his published writing is about Fijians. Like most other whites in the islands, he looked for and found his Pacific Romance among Fijians. In Fiji, in the late 1870s, concerned about decline in population, about keeping the peace, and about making the colony profitable, the first colonial governor instituted a form of customary law, that well predated the better-known forms of British colonial Indirect Rule

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designed in Africa in the early twentieth century. Under Sir Arthur Gordon’s system, a vast apparatus of rule through Native Administration was concerned with ordering and observing Fijians and codifying their custom. The Native Lands Commission surveyed lands, interviewed Fijians, and reserved 83 per cent of Fiji’s land for communal, inalienable Fijian possession. The remaining lands, and rented Native lands, were used for Fiji’s plantation sugar industry, eventually run by a single corporation chosen by the colonial administration. Rather than employing Fijians on the sugar plantations, Gordon, who had previously served as governor in Trinidad and Mauritius, instituted a system of indentured labour, with Indians from the British colony of India coming on contracts to cut sugar cane. Though a reader of Kipling and tales of Indian customs and culture, Joske, as colonial administrator, absorbed Fiji’s peculiar distinction: in Fiji, it was believed, Fijians had customs and customary law, whereas Indians were workers, bound by contract law. Later, Mr Joske (renamed on his title page as A.B. Brewster, Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute) is already among the scholars who (almost invariably) have focused only on Fijian society, history, and culture. This has always been what the audience for Fiji has wanted, whether present-day tourists or the curious, exotic-fancying buyers of Mr Joske’s books, with Fijian maiden frontispiece or titles promising tales of “cannibals.” When it comes to labour diaspora peoples, there is more in Joske’s books about the Pacific islanders who worked Fiji’s early plantations than about the Indian immigrants. They come up, most strikingly, as the solution to every cultured settler’s dilemma: how to get a good cook. Here I quote several passages from the total of five pages out of 302 in The Hill Tribes that discuss the indentured Indians: I had a great deal to do with assisting the Indian settlers in getting leases of native lands, many of which I pegged out myself. We used to have an ordinance which permitted of the magistrates marking out blocks of not more than ten acres on account of the scarcity of duly qualified surveyors. I had read all Meadows Taylor’s books [Taylor, a colonial administrator in India, was one of the chief chroniclers of Thuggee], and was deeply interested in Indian rural life. The new environ affected the religious observances of these immigrants, and tended to a general subversion of morals, making it more difficult to keep them in



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order. They ate all sorts of unlawful things, and did many things which were wrong according to their own ideas of morality. This was at first, before any of their own holy men appeared upon the scene; afterwards when some of them came along they insisted upon the due performance of worship and ancient custom and then matters improved … The last time I held court at Tavua on the northern sea coast, where these people were principally congregated … the whole of the free Indian settlers came to the Court House in gala dress bringing tea, biscuits, fruit, cigars, ginger beer, sweet-meats and all sorts of things which they presented to me, together with a plated tea and coffee service and a silver manicure set for my wife. I took it as a very great tribute of their affection as I was leaving them for good, and they could have no hope of any favour from me in return. Subsequently Indian lawyers and agitators arrived and stirred up sedition and discontent. By their machinations a Commission was sent down from India to inquire as to the condition of their people in Fiji. It was composed, I believe, mostly of the class who are so arrogantly demanding equal status throughout the Empire, and they reported adversely and recommended that immigration in Fiji be stopped. It was a most unjust decision, as nowhere were Indians more fairly treated. After that some of Gandhi’s adherents appeared upon the scene and there were riots and strikes which were suppressed mainly by the loyalty of the Fijians who everywhere volunteered as special constables [and broke strikes by replacing Indian workers] … In justice to a great many of the Indians it should be added that the extremists coerced them into joining the strikes by threats of death. Many of them, especially the domestic servants, were deeply attached to their masters and mistresses and although they complied outwardly in the day time with the leaders’ orders, at night they returned to perform the household duties. Many of my friends have had Indians in their employ for nearly twenty years, and those of us who go back to the scene of our labours are generally looked up by their old servants, who ask to be taken on again. My own cook was with me for thirteen years, and I left him established upon a small farm. Now, alas! he has gone the way of all flesh, but all who visited Nadarivatu will remember the faithful Ferdinand and his great culinary skill. (1922: 299–302)

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If the real diasporic Indians aren’t much there in Mr Joske’s texts, India is, as a deep well of touchstones for his own colonial experience. Well furnished by Kipling, Joske’s Fiji drew on the tales of sinister Mutiny he heard when newly arrived in Fiji, sharing the mosquito net with the old India hand. Reading Meadows Taylor he absorbed the colonial legends of Thuggee. From Kipling he got more charming and malleable understandings: the Fijians are loyal, amusingly attired like Gunga Din; the Indians he would like to remember pay him tribute, give him tea sets, and are faithful cooks forever. But from that early imperial sharing under the mosquito net with its tales of the mutiny, Joske never loses his simultaneous fear of threats to his lawgiving order: Indian lawyers – presumptuous counterlawgivers – who arrive to threaten and negate the affectionate tea set, bringing sedition and discontent (legally proscribed as “disaffection” in colonial Fiji’s law). The woodland sprites of luveniwai and silver tea sets share a space with darker touchstones of disorder: compatriots of the tea-set givers seek to “arrogantly demand equal status throughout Empire” (1922: 300), luveniwai gives way to Tuka, with its sinister whale’s teeth which recollect the chupatties of the mutiny and its Fijian leader who styles himself a lawgiver.

Being Roman It is in this context that we can read Mr Joske’s account of the appearance of Mosese Dukumoi, also known as Navosavakadua, leader in the 1880s of the political-religious Tuka movement. (Navosavakadua means “the only voice” or “he who speaks once and is effective” – the same term, Joske noted, was used by Fijians to refer to the colonial Supreme Court justice.) Navosavakadua’s self-fashioning as a lawgiver addressed coastal chiefs’ presumptions, missionaries’ claims, and the lawgiving projects of hinterland colonial figures like Mr Joske. He gathered together adherents from “Twelve Tribes” at an inland pilgrimage place, organizing both a movement and a political form that was creative, syncretic, and tremendously threatening to the Fijian colonial order. Mr Joske was viscerally affected by Navosavakadua: “He was certainly not much to look at,” he wrote, “being very black and of a decidedly Melanesian type. He looked bilious and overfed, and had a dazed far-away look as if he was continually under the influence



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of narcotics” (1922: 244). Arrested and tried as a Dangerous and Disaffected Native, under new regulations passed primarily to control the hill people, Navosavakadua would be deported to Rotuma, and his kin to the island of Kadavu, home of Fijians “strongly impregnated with Polynesian blood and consequently light-skinned, good looking, and inclined to gaiety” (229), Joske wrote. Elsewhere he links their Polynesian bodily admixture to a resistance to Navosavakadua’s doctrines. Gazing at Navosavakadua – “I went over to attend the Court, not as a judicial officer, but to watch the case from my special knowledge of Tuka” (225) – Joske became an authority. Disciplining Tuka followers and other wrongdoers, he organized a crew of hill-tribe prisoners to cut roads in the hill country, and called them his “Lost Legion.” He thus became a Roman. Joske’s understanding of Rome arrives via British novelists and poets. He quotes Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome composed when Macaulay was a colonial administrator in India. He alludes to Kipling’s romantic portrayals of the Lost Legion. Whether it is Kipling, or others, the metaphors and the relationships were in many cases already drawn for him. What Kipling gave him, specially, was the “good language” (cf. Greg Dening (1992), on “Mr Bligh’s Bad Language”) to become a self-styled Roman. In chronicling the failure of Captain Bligh to win the respect of his men, Dening traced perceptively this failure to gain their full acceptance of his leadership. The rare British sea officer who rose from the ranks of common seamen (due to his superior skills when actually at sea), Bligh was resented for his command and discipline, especially when the Bounty was under great material stress, as we know from the facts of the actual historic mutiny against Bligh. What Dening shows, though, is that the legend of Bligh as harsh disciplinarian is belied by the ship records which detail rates of flogging and other acts of discipline and punishment lower than the British naval averages. Dening argues that in crisis, it was class prejudice, Bligh’s inability to be the gentleman, master, and therefore commander, that enabled deprivation and jeopardy to generate mutinous resistance to unpopular commands. Thus, we see exactly where Joske found his gentlemanly language and voice, in the well-loved Kiplings of Empire, and exactly what he did with it; he become A.B. Brewster. (Only people as informed as late Fiji archivist Mr Setariki Tuinaceva could later be skeptical, as when he joked, “Did that make him Adolph Brewster Brewster?”)

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From Hinterland Disaffection to Folk Practices As Mr Joske became Mr Brewster, Fiji was moving from a site of colonial pacification to a routinized colony. Bodies were crucial to the colonial body politic in Fiji. Heterogeneity, of colonizers and the colonized, meant that these bodies were relative, polysemic, and always reviewed in hierarchical contexts. Most interesting about the transforming personae of Mr Joske into Mr Brewster is the change in his tone concerning hinterland Tuka bodies and the body politic. The change is from his sober minute papers from the late 1800s warning of warriors with blackened faces crossing provincial borders, to later cozy comparisons of Fijian deities with woodland sprites. In the 1880s, in Stipendiary Magistrate Joske’s reports, invulnerability rites were made illegal, their practitioners monitored. Colonial inquiry included the question “what is the evil in the practice?” Statutes against Disaffected and Dangerous Natives were put into effect. But in the 1920s, in Mr Brewster’s memoirs published from afar (Torquay) there was no need to ask “what was the evil?” Mr Brewster’s audience knew already, but found it more diverting than dangerous.

Lawgiving, the Hill Tribes of Fiji, and “the Cultural Forces in Play” During oral history interviews about nineteenth-century leader Mosese Dukumoi, who was called Navosavakadua, and his Tuka movement, with Navosavakadua’s and his followers’ descendants, in Ra in the 1980s and 1990s, I occasionally asked people if they had heard of Mr Joske who commanded the Armed Native Constabulary at Nadarivatu in the 1880s and who had such an active role in investigating and arresting Navosavakadua and his followers. I never met anyone who had tales of Joske/Brewster. They did remember and narrate the experience of the consequences of his findings of “danger and disaffection”: arrests and deportations. Navosavakadua was deported to Rotuma, many of his relatives and followers to Kadavu. Most important to Vatukaloko people, however, was the story of their ancestor oracle priest Navosavakadua, his vision, and his leadership (Kaplan 1995; and see Kaplan 2005, 2007). In that history, we can see how the projects and plans of hill-tribe Fijians did much to shape Mr Joske.



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In 1874 Mr Joske could not have been the governor of colonial Fiji. That kind of post went first to more aristocratic appointees, like Sir Arthur Gordon. But he got work when the colonial project put its signs and systems at risk, as Sahlins would argue, in its ramifying effort to enfold Fijian history into itself. When the new colony met challenges and unrest from the hill people, and complexities in its engagement with Fijian modes of social order emerged (as when coastal high chiefs proved unable to pacify the highlands), Gordon looked to old Fiji hands to manage the people of the interior. Joske’s colonial employment began as Walter Carew’s second in command as resident commissioner in Colo East (Brewster 1922: 47ff). As we have seen, the Colo provinces, in the interior of Fiji’s biggest island, were historically less hierarchical polities than their Eastern coastal neighbours. Eastern coastal chiefs claimed sovereignty over some of the interior and hinterland peoples, and ritual and political struggles ensued. While Eastern coastal chiefs made their ritual and political power as dangerous foreigners, or synthetic descendants of chief-strangers and the women of the land (Sahlins 1985a), some interior peoples, such as the Vatukaloko, led by Navosavakadua, traced their autonomy to a ritual priority rooted in descent from gods of the land, from the interior Kauvadra Range. Certain of the inland people refused to follow King Cakobau, coastal chiefs, and people into Christianity in 1854, denied access to coastal labour recruiters in service of white planters, and did not acknowledge Cession to the Queen in 1874 (Kaplan 1989a, 1989b, 1990a, 1990b, 1995). After a military campaign against the interior people, Gordon authorized the hinterland station at Nadarivatu with its small corps of Armed Native Constabulary where Mr Joske spent much of his early colonial career. Because of this history, and unlike the coastal and island provinces, headed by Fijian administrators, Governor Gordon decided that the interior provinces were to be headed by white resident commissioners (1922: 47). Joske’s opportunity, to remake himself as a Roman began in the midst of these “cultural forces in play” in the colonial intersection with a deeper Fijian history, in an opposition between coastal kingdoms and interior peoples. Joske’s propensity for writing himself as not-Fijian took shape as well, as he saw coastal, Christian Fijians distinguish themselves from the unshorn heathen “big heads,” the Tuka adherents and followers of Navosavakadua, of the interior. Like Methodist missionary chroniclers of Fiji, he lauded Christian chiefs and deplored

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superstitious warrior priests of the hills. In these conjunctures, an enduring history as “disaffected” was created for the hill tribes, a history that has been both a limit and a resource. Lawgiving is a key aspect of the self-fashioning of Navosavakadua, leader of the movement against Christianity, colonialism, and their Fijian coastal allies. Colonial reports (Mr Joske’s among them) called him the leader of the Tuka movement, and denigrated it as heathen, superstition, and backsliding. They saw him as leader of a disaffected crowd, not subjects of a constituted, orderly Fijian or colonial polity. But Navosavakadua seems to have sought to constitute his own, new form of polity. Its authority drew on the leadership of oracle priests, not chiefs, and on hybrid deities, not the colonial established church. Self-named as Moses, he organized leadership, boundaries, and ritual practice for his followers. In the twentieth century his descendants and the descendants of his followers refashioned him as a Moses whose legacy and memory shaped their journey out of exile and punishment into return to lands at the foot of the Kauvadra Mountain Range (see Kaplan 1995). Thinking about Mr Joske turning himself from Jew to Roman brings to mind other British imperial figures who imagined themselves Roman, such as Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), who wrote The Lays of Ancient Rome while serving as legal member of the Supreme Council of India, 1834–1838. Of even more interest is Sir William Jones (1746–1794), who in India set himself as a codifier of Indian law. As Bernard Cohn (1987) shows, Jones saw himself as a Roman, a lawgiver, who “gave” the Indians the (“their”) Laws of Manu. Of course Jones began his lawgiving career secure in his sense of self as a Roman, “Sir” William Jones, a classical scholar and barrister educated at Oxford. But I do not raise Macaulay or Jones to think of Joske as a participant in a unified colonial discourse. Considering the turn of anthropology to history, we learn much from the consideration of British culture in the making of British colonial power. We could not understand Mr Joske if we did not reflect on how forms of knowledge are modalities of power. However, we end here asking different questions about this complex colonial engagement. In our case, pondering Joske becoming Brewster, we could still argue from a unified model of a general British colonial culture (and borrow the image from Merleau-Ponty adopted by LéviStrauss, the idea that the landscape thinks through the painter, the myth through the person; in this sense, still, the British discourses



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are after all thinking through and transforming Joske). On the path blazed by Sahlins, however, we can pursue not only the cultural dimensions of colonial power and its impact on and via knowledge, but also the powers in culture. The history of Joske’s agency is both informed by colonial culture and in a charmingly manipulated way, a deliberate extension and motivated refashioning of it. It is not merely that Joske becomes an author. Just as Sahlins argues that history explodes the diversity of culture structures, so too authorships and their forms of authority merit fine-grained attention to their distinctions, powers, and consequences. Joske did not become an author in general, he became the Kipling of Fiji for its imperial audience and therefore a Kipling for Fiji’s future. Thus, we come full circle to Sahlins’s points about primary sources quoted at the outset. The point is not that Joske pretended to be a Kipling and was therefore biased in his tales of Fijians. The point is that he was, after all, startlingly empowered as both a significant actor in the events he related, and was (unlike Bligh) able to fully embrace and use the relevant literary tools and values. Thus, he really did become the British, Roman, Brewster. By his ability to authoritatively rework and extend imperial patterns of description and understanding, Joske made himself into the British kind of Roman, as he codified, in The Hill Tribes, the customary ways of the “Native” people. And he did not have to do this, though he certainly helped the empire make sense of the Fijian hinterland in its own particular way. Most soberly his description had obvious, enduring costs, especially for Navosavakadua and his followers. It could have been otherwise. Mr Joske (and for that matter Sir William Jones) could have found a cherished image of lawgiving in the figure of a Jew – Moses. But Mr Joske had met Moses (Mosese Dukumoi, aka Navosavakadua) and decided that he would rather be a Roman.

Notes 1 A conference paper by historian Arthur Williamson on Roman and Old Testament imagery in colonial discourse sparked my reading of Joske’s many references to Rome. Williamson argues that the imperial British (and some in the empire, notably certain Scottish elites) thought of empire as Roman – and see also Betts (1971) on “The Allusion to Rome in British Imperialist Thought of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth

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Centuries” – a point long made by Bernard Cohn, for example, in relation to Sir William Jones. From reading Williamson I also began to think about the ways that Jews figured as another category in the imagings of power and difference in empire – though I think that the Jew Mr Joske feared to be is very different from the Jews the Scottish elites imagined and hoped to evangelize. 2 See Kaye (1966), Sen (1957), Guha (1983), Arnold (1993), and Bhabha (1994) for influential accounts of these chappaties. They variously argue about comparison with Scottish burning crosses, about protonationalism, about plague warnings as the British army was an inadvertent choleraspreading vector (Arnold 1993), and about the anxiety from uncertainty of the meanings represented by the chappaties as itself constitutive of the uncanny circulation (Bhabha 1994). And see, most recently, Manan Ahmed’s excellent and influential blog Chapati Mystery (http://www.chapatimystery.com/about).

5 Supplement to Marshall Sahlins’s Voyage Around the Islands of History (Tahiti 1768, Samoa 1787) Serge Tcherkézoff The focus of this contribution1 is the apparent sexual offers that Polynesian women made to the first Europeans who arrived in Polynesia. If we go back to some journals written during the early voyages, which have still not been studied in as much detail as they deserve, we discover an unexpected aspect of these apparent sexual offers: the “girls’ very young” age and their “weeping.” This leads us toward a hypothesis. Many Polynesian sources attest that young girls who entered into marriage with a high chief had to be virgins (or at least girls who had not given birth).2 Other myths describe how young virgins would get pregnant by sitting nude in front of the rays of the rising sun.3 In the ritual dances, the first row was reserved for these young virgins.4 What was the special significance of virginity in all of these cases? The answer could well lie in the dialogue that Captain Bligh held with a number of Tahitians in 1789. He relates that he had numerous conversations with the “Queen” and with other “principal” people. Among other subjects, he made a “long enquiry,” he says, about a belief that the “Queen” would have her first child “through the inspiration of the Eatua” (atua, the god): “The Queen, whoever she is, has her first Born Son, or the one that becomes the Heir to the Crown, through the inspiration of the Eatua. Nay more than that, they assert that while the Woman is asleep and the Husband by her, the Eatua hovers over her, and literally explaining their expression, says he has connection with her & she conceives, but that all the

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other children are begot by the Husband” (Bligh 1789, quoted in Oliver 1974: 442). A partial confirmation of this is to be found in Teuira Henry’s reconstruction of the rites surrounding birth “when a queen was about to be delivered of her first child, called the matahiapo.” The songs chanted by those in attendance praise “the cord of the child, the sacred cord of the god that has flown hither.”5 James Morrison, who lived in Tahiti from 1789 to 1791, explains that the high chief of the time (Pomare II) had a divine father: “His Mother declaring that the Deity (Taane) Cohabited with her in her Sleep and, proving Pregnant soon after, the Child was declared to be the offspring of the Deity and is rever’d as something supernatural” (Oliver 1974: 774). My contention is that, at the initiative of the chiefs and priests-orators, the total cosmological framework, the mythical structure, and the underpinning of the Polynesian idea and practice of “theogamy” was transposed without modification onto the scene of the encounters with Europeans. These Europeans were considered envoys from the realm of these sources of fecundity, this cosmology demanding the presence of a female agent who had not yet given birth. This contention is based on a range of enquiries over a number of years. I happen to have been doing fieldwork in Samoa from early 1981, focusing on social and political organization. Rather unexpectedly, this led me to tackle gender issues, since the political structure strongly showed a deep contrast between a whole set of relations centred around the brother-sister pair and another set centred around the husband-wife pair. Thus, I was led to enquire into “men/women” relations in general, including representations of sexuality (Tcherkézoff 1993, 2003a). When the “Mead-Freeman debate” began in 1983, and Derek Freeman himself came to Samoa to give several presentations, I felt that the arguments vividly exchanged all failed to give accurate consideration to the beginning of the European myth-making of “Polynesian sexuality.” I gradually undertook a close reading of early sources regarding Samoa (Tcherkézoff 2004a). As I discovered that the sources, when read in their entirety and not only through secondary quotations of sentences taken out of their initial context (the journals of the first European visits), presented a very different picture, I began to ask how the Samoan context could have been so different from the Tahitian one as



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“described” by the same early visitors? I found myself delving into the sources relating to early visits in Tahiti, only to find that much of the established “knowledge” about early Tahiti was largely misconstrued (Tcherkézoff 2004b). When revised, both cases were very similar, despite the fact they came from opposite ends of Polynesia and had little contact with each other. I then thought that some generalization about early European visits in Polynesia could be offered for discussion.6 I finalized this essay in 2006, when Alex Golub came up with the idea of a Festschrift for Marshall Sahlins. It was twenty-five years after a certain lecture given by the same Marshall Sahlins. In Paris, in a lecture given at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in 1981, Marshall Sahlins, while addressing the question of Captain Cook’s fate in Hawai‘i, raised a point that was to change the view on these first sexual encounters. He hypothesized that, in the Hawaiian case, contrary to what these early voyagers had thought, it was not “sexual hospitality” offered to male travellers. Rather, said Sahlins, it was a transposition of a mythical and social schema: “theogamy,” marriage with creatures considered to be envoys of the gods, as partial images of these gods. The aim was to produce powerful children and to secure new kinds of powers. Sahlins found a first expression of this hypothesis in Diderot’s famous Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage Around the World customs (1964 [1796]), presented as a dialogue between a Tahitian elder and a European priest,7 and he thus entitled his 1981 lecture “Supplement to Captain Cook’s Voyage,” published later as chapter 1 of his Islands of History (1985a).8 That very year, 1981, as a freshly incorporated member of the EHESS, I was on my way for the first time to the Samoan islands, instructed by Daniel de Coppet to read carefully Sahlins’s Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island (1962a) as a masterful example of Pacific ethnography. A few years later, a team of the EHESS translated and in 1989 its press published Des Îles dans l’Histoire (Islands of History), a copy of which also made its way to Samoa several times in my bag. These conjunctions of sailing routes prompt me to offer here to Marshall, in homage to his pioneering views of 1981, my own tiny “supplement.” Indeed, a further enquiry into the mythical and social scheme of this “theogamy” can now be opened, at least for other parts of Polynesia. Why, in Samoa and in Tahiti,9 did the females who were presented to the first European male visitors have to be so young? Why were they weeping?

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Western “Knowledge” about Pre-Christian Samoan and Tahitian “Customs” Relating to Adolescence and Marriage The very first Europeans to set foot on Samoan soil were French – the officers and crew of Lapérouse’s expedition, and the encounter lasted only two days (10 and 11 December 1787). The report describing the behaviour of the inhabitants insisted on two aspects. The Samoan men were “ferocious barbarians” (because of the fight during the second day, where a dozen of the French – but some 30 Samoans who are hardly ever mentioned – died) (Tcherkézoff 2004a: chapter 4). The women, on the other hand, gained the admiring approval of the French visitors. Even after the “massacre,” Lapérouse noted, “Among a fairly large number of women I noticed two or three who were very pretty and who [one] could have thought had served as a model for the charming drawing of the Present Bearer of Cook’s third voyage,10 their hair was adorned with flowers … their eyes, their features, their movement spoke of gentleness whereas those of the men depicted ferocity and surprise. In any one sculptor[’s] study the latter would have been taken for Hercules and the young women for Diana, or her nymphs” (Dunmore, who translated and edited Lapérouse, 1995: 412–13). Lapérouse’s bias in favour of the women is explained by the sexual encounters that occurred during the stay and to which the French captain refers in his conclusion on the “customs” of the Samoans: “Whatever navigators who preceded us might say, I am convinced that at least in the Navigators Islands girls are mistresses of their own favours before marriage, their complaisance casts no dishonour on them, and it is more likely that when they marry they are under no obligation to account for their past behaviour. But I have no doubt that they are required to show more restraint when they are married” (Dunmore 1995: 420). After a mere two days of encounters on land, Lapérouse, without being able to understand a single word of the local language, had formed an opinion about the Samoan customs governing adolescence and marriage! Of course, he had already certain preconceptions of the ways of the “Indians” in that part of the Pacific, through his reading of Bougainville’s and Cook’s accounts of Tahiti and neighbouring islands. A careful reading of the succession of events described in Lapérouse’s journal (Tcherkézoff 2004a: 28–67) reveals the only scenes that Lapérouse’s officers could have seen and participated



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in: one or two “visits” to a village during which some of the French were taken inside a house where they were asked to have intercourse with a young girl. Limited as his experience of Samoan culture was, Lapérouse’s opinion – condensed in this single sentence that abruptly summarizes the upbringing and the rules of behaviour applying to Samoan girls – became an accepted part of Western anthropological “knowledge” about Polynesia. A century and a half later, in a vast compilation of Polynesian customs, which developed into several treatises and standard works of reference for any student of Polynesia, Williamson (1924, 1933, 1939), who had been instructed by Seligman to gather all the information available on this part of the Pacific, quoted that same sentence (from the 1797 publication of Lapérouse’s journal) in order to characterize the absence of “chastity” in pre-Christian Samoa (Williamson 1939: 156). And then, in the 1980s, when the heated debate initiated by Freeman (1983) focused on Mead’s 1926 fieldwork dealing with Samoan adolescence and her conclusions in Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead 1928; Tcherkézoff 2001a, 2001b, 2001c), one of the champions of Mead’s views called on Lapérouse as a witness: Williamson (1939/1975) carried out an extensive review of all of the early accounts of Polynesian cultures … With respect to premarital sex in general, he said that in Samoa: “According to Turner and Brown [early missionaries], chastity … was more a name than a reality … Lapérouse tells us that girls were, before marriage, ‘mistresses of their own favors, and their complaisance did not dishonor them’ (p. 156)” … From these many accounts, there can be little doubt that sexual behavior in Samoa before it was Christianized was more casual for virtually everyone, including young females. The denial of this by Freeman and some contemporary Samoans can be understood in terms of the concerted efforts of missionaries and the local pastors to create, and then maintain, a hegemony of Victorian sexual values and practices. (Côté 1994: 80–2) Twenty years earlier, in Tahiti, very similar scenes had been played out, and these were similarly absorbed into what were to become the Western canons about “Polynesian” customs. On only the second or third day of their Tahitian visit (7 or 8 April 1768), a small group of French officers (we can identify three of them from the

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journals) told their Captain, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, that they had been sexually “offered” a “young girl” in the chiefly household that they had visited. Bougainville recorded this in his journal, and in his book of 1771, famous throughout Europe, he abusively generalized: “several Frenchmen” had told him what kind of “hospitality” they had enjoyed, “in the custom of this island”; indeed, “we are offered all the young girls” (Bougainville 1966 [1771]: 194–5; Dunmore, who edited and translated Bougainville, 2002: 63). He later reflected upon this extraordinary society which had clearly remained as it was in Eden, untouched and spared the consequences of the Fall: Tahitian girls were “as was Eve before her sin” (as his companion Fesche expressed it, in Dunmore 2002: 257). We must note that Bougainville, even if he generalized instead of quoting the exact narratives of his companions (as can be seen when reading the events described in his companions’ journals), spoke of “the young girls” offered. A close study of the journals written by the members of Bougainville’s expedition (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 114–239) shows how the Frenchmen immediately imagined that this kind of behaviour had always been the local “custom” among Tahitians. The Frenchmen, like many early European visitors to the Polynesian islands, could not imagine that they were perceived as not-entirely-human creatures and even as envoys from the realm of the gods. They thought that they were received merely as voyagers to whom “hospitality” was offered. The Frenchmen had no conception that the way in which the girls behaved toward them was extraordinary. They were also blind – and how strange this seems given the scenes they were witnessing – to the fact that the girls were forcibly presented to them by adults. They were apparently deeply convinced that, among people who had remained in a “state of nature,” females engaging in sexual acts were only following the impulses of their “female nature.”11 And that here in this society they were “free” to follow those impulses.

Samoan Facts: The Scene Observed by Lapérouse Lapérouse’s narrative gives us some clues about the scenes in which the Samoan girls made the French believe that they were “mistresses of their own favours.” In the conclusion to his narrative, Lapérouse adds a passage which, given his typically cautious style, he was clearly hesitant about including in his official journal:



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As the story of our voyage can add a few pages to that of mankind I will not omit pictures that might shock in any other kind of book and I shall mention that the very small number of young and pretty island girls I referred to soon attracted the attention of a few Frenchmen who in spite of my orders endeavoured to establish links of intimacy with them; since our Frenchmen’s eyes revealed their desires they were soon discovered; some old women negotiated the transaction, an altar was set up in the most prominent hut, all the blinds were lowered, inquisitive spectators were driven off; the victim was placed within the arms of an old man who exhorted her to moderate her sorrow for she was weeping (qui l’exortoit à moderer sa douleur,12 car elle pleuroit); the matrons sang and howled during the ceremony, and the sacrifice was consummated in the presence of the women and the old man was acting as altar and priest. All the village’s women and children were around and outside the house, lightly raising the blinds and seeking the slightest gaps between the mats to enjoy this spectacle. Whatever navigators who preceded us might say, I am convinced that at least in the Navigators Islands girls are mistresses of their own favours before marriage, their complaisance casts no dishonour on them. (Dunmore 1995: 419–20) If the last sentence – which unerringly made its way into the twentieth-century literature as we have seen – is a typical example of European overinterpretation and overgeneralization, the preceding lines tell us what Lapérouse actually saw or at least what he had been told by some of his officers. In Lapérouse’s entire narrative of his stay in the Samoan archipelago, the only actual description he gives of a sexual act is this “sacrifice” in the “prominent hut.” Let us keep in mind a few points. This incident concerned only a “very small number of young … girls I referred to.” The “victims” were only “girls.” Each girl was “weeping.” She was apparently held by the orator during the “operation,” since this “old man” is said by Lapérouse to have himself been the “altar” on which the “sacrifice” was performed. She was presented in “the most prominent hut,” which seems to indicate a high stone base, which identifies the hut as the house of the main chief. All the blinds were lowered, and the women “sang and howled.” What Lapérouse describes corresponds to the enactment of a nineteenth-century Samoan marriage ceremony where the young bride was a virgin and was ceremonially deflowered. We can find

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in the narratives of the 1830s–50s the same spatial and temporal disposition. Even Lapérouse’s reference to the “matrons singing and howling” corresponds to what William T. Pritchard observed in the 1850s (Tcherkézoff 2003a: 350–70). Lapérouse’s remark that “all the blinds were lowered” is also very important. There were only two cases where an activity would be conducted inside a house with all the blinds lowered. One was a defloration ceremony. The other was a “meeting with the spirits” (fono ma aitu) when chiefs of the village, faced with making an important and difficult decision, and needing some superhuman inspiration, met at night and silently (Tcherkézoff 2004a: chapter 3). Let us now move to Tahiti and the events of almost twenty years before.

Tahitian Facts: The Scenes of 7–9 April (according to Nassau and Fesche) Nassau, 7 April 1768 When we compare the French journals and examine the dates of daily entries we find that the first “offering of girls” reported to Bougainville by his men occurred on 7 April, the first full day the French spent on land. The Prince of Nassau, who had been with Chevalier d’Oraison, tells us that they were “keen to call on their chief”: “When I arrived at his home, they served us fruit, then the women offered me a young girl. The Indians surrounded me and each was eager to share with his eyes in the pleasure I was about to enjoy. The young girl was very pretty but European preconceptions require more mystery. An Indian used very singular means to further excite my desires. Happy nation that does not yet know the odious names of shame and scandal” (Nassau, in Dunmore 2002: 283). We can note that a presentation, understood by the French as an “offering” (of a sexual gift), was made as soon as the French came on land. The adults were so keen for Nassau, as the apparent leader of the group, to be able to act his part that they tried to get him “excited” in a “very singular” way (of which we are told nothing more). Was this merely a matter of sexual “hospitality” staged by the dominant males of the place for their visitors – with women fully participating (by bringing in the girl?). The French assumed that it was, but they were blind to the exercise of masculine power since, for them, these scenes only showed how in Tahitian society “women” were generally “free” to “follow their natural drives” (see quotations



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in Tcherkézoff 2004b: 169–72, 202–7, 223–39). But, even given the gendered complexities of the “offer,” a gift of sexual hospitality would surely not have involved rushing upon the new arrivals in this manner, and trying to force them into accepting their offers. Nassau reported that, in the chief’s house he visited, the “young girl” was “offered,” and that this offer was made by “the women.” He does not say that the women offered their own favours. Nassau also tells us that there was a crowd who “surrounded” him and the girl. This gave the French to believe, as they noted in their journals, and Bougainville in his official voyage account, that “Tahitian custom” required, or at least allowed the performance of the sexual act to occur “publicly,” and even made of it a “public festival.” The French would continue to interpret any event involving their own presence in terms of the imagined everyday practices of Tahitian life. They did not for a moment suppose that all of this might be quite exceptional or, at least, occasioned specifically by families ceremonially giving their young daughters in marriage to powerful strangers imagined to be akin to sacred high chiefs. Fesche on 7 April Together in the chief’s house with Nassau and Chevalier d’Oraison was the young adventurer Fesche, who had volunteered to join Bougainville’s voyage of circumnavigation: There were three of us, we go off with the intent of taking a walk escorted by a group of islanders, we arrive at a hut where we are welcomed by the master of the house, he firstly shows us his possessions, making us understand that he was waiting for his wives who were due to arrive shortly. We go together, he shows us the tree the bark of which is used to make the loincloths they wear as their clothing and tells us the names of all that country’s fruits. After some time spent strolling, we returned to his home where we found his wife and young girl aged 12 or 13. We are made to sit, they bring us coconuts and bananas, we are invited to eat, we conform to their wishes. We then see each one of them pick up a green branch13 and sit in a circle around us, one of those present took a flute from which he drew pleasant soft sounds and they brought a mat that they laid out on the open space and on which the young girl sat down. All the Indians’ gestures made us clearly understand what this was about, however this practice being so contrary to

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those established for us and wanting to be sure of it, one of us [Nassau14] goes up to the offered victim, makes her the gift of an artificial pearl that he attaches to her ear, and ventures a kiss, which was well returned. A bold hand led by love slips down to two new-born apples (deux pommes naissantes) rivals of each other and worthy like those of Helen to serve as models for cups that would be incomparable for their beauty and the attraction of their shape. The hand soon slipped and by a fortunate effect of chance, fell on charms still hidden by one of their cloths, it was promptly removed by the girl herself whom we saw then dressed as Eve was before her sin. She did more, she stretched out on the mat, struck the chest of the aggressor, making him understand that she was giving herself to him and drew aside those two obstacles that defend the entrance to that temple where so many men make a daily sacrifice. The summons was very appealing and the athlete caressing her was too skilled in the art of fencing not to take her right away had not the presence of the surrounding 50 Indians, through the effect of our prejudices, put the brake on his fierce desires. (Fesche, in Dunmore 2002: 257) It should be noted that the girl was presented wearing a “loincloth,” that is barkcloth, which shows that she had been intentionally dressed for a ceremony. (If she had just come from work in the garden, she would have had on a belt of leaves.) We can judge the girl’s youth from the expression used to describe her breasts, together with Fesche’s own assessment that she was “aged 12 or 13.” And if, as Fesche says at the beginning, the man went to look for his “wives,” it was only the young girl who was offered. If we are to believe Nassau and Fesche, the role of the “women” was in fact to tell the girl what she had to do (Nassau: “the women offered me a young girl”) and, by means of gestures, together with the other adults, to make the French understand what was involved (Fesche: “All the Indians’ gestures made us clearly understand what this was about”).

“Tahitian Marriages” (Fesche) Fesche, the only observer to give us specific details about the first sexual presentation of a young girl, also provides us with a summary



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that either takes this scene up again, adding a number of points, or combines it with other similar scenes at which he had been present or that other men had described to him. Indeed, Fesche prides himself on describing “their marriages” for us. Like the rest of the French visitors, he of course knows nothing about how Tahitians might have conceived such marriages, the French only having stayed for ten days. At least, he admits straight away that he is only hypothesizing. What is interesting for us is that he admits that he is relying only on the sexual offerings made to the French (see his text below). For that reason, we need to pay his account some attention. It is not an imaginary tale about Tahitian marriages but the presentation of points in common between the several scenes of sexual presentation that were enacted for the benefit of the French. The description provides an important piece of information that I shall comment upon in a later section, namely, the performance of an “operation” that made the young girl “cry.” But first of all let us note two aspects, namely, that the Tahitians tried to force the French to take action and that the girl was still young and was “brought forward” by the adults. The Tahitian adults were surely following a definite strategy. Fesche’s Text Their marriages are, I believe, made in public. I make this supposition on the basis of what happened to possibly two-thirds of the Frenchmen: the fathers and mothers who brought their girls (amenaient leurs filles), presented them to the one who pleased them, and urged them to consummate the task of marriage with them (consommer l’oeuvre de mariage avec elle). The girl (la fille) struck the chest of the one to whom she was being offered, uttered a few words that expressed, from the meaning we have attributed to them,15 the surrender she was making of herself, lay down on the ground and removed her clothing. Several made a fuss when it came to the point (Plusieurs faisaient des façons quand il s’agissait d’en venir au fait), however they allowed themselves to be persuaded. During the operation (Durant l’opération), the islanders assisting [with the operation], always present in large numbers, made a circle around them, holding a green branch, sometimes they threw one of their cloths over the actor, as in

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Cythera they covered the happy lovers with greenery. If one of them happened to have a flute, he would play it, others accompanied him singing couplets dedicated to pleasure.16 Once the operation was over, the girl would cry (L’opération finie, la fille pleurait), but would easily recover her composure and make a thousand caresses to her new spouse as well as to all those who had been witnesses. There is some evidence that these are the same ceremonies as are used in their weddings; there may be some other formalities required, I believe this all the more readily because [when it happened that] an officer from the Etoile to whom a young Indian girl had offered herself was not favourably disposed, a Cytheran [named Ahutoru], the same one who joined us on board to follow us in our travels, took the girl and showed the officer how he should act. If there were no other formalities than those for a marriage, he would not have acted in this way. Moreover, all they did for us can only be viewed as honors they wished to pay to strangers. Married women are a model of faithfulness [… but “those who are unmarried are free and prostitute themselves with whomever takes their fancy”]. (Fesche 2002: 259–60; words in brackets added by author) A Forced Encounter Fesche begins his passage by saying, “their marriages are, I believe, made in public.” But let us go straight to the conclusion: seeing the officer’s difficulty, Ahutoru gave a demonstration of what had to be done. Fesche saw in this further confirmation that “marriage” (what he was really interested in was the act of intercourse) was performed in front of everyone. But his remark about what Ahutoru did on this occasion is very useful. It confirms something that comes up on at least five occasions in the French accounts, namely, that the Tahitians did everything they could to force the French to engage in sexual intercourse. These were the episodes (Tcherkézoff 2004b: chapters 5–6): 1 The first contact at sea (5 April) involving two young girls “from thir­­teen to fourteen years old” who were presented in a canoe while the adults made gestures that clearly mimicked the act of intercourse.



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2 and 3 The presentation of “Venus” (the first Tahitian woman who went on board, an adolescent who was accompanying Ahutoru: 6 April) and of “Helen” (the scene of 7 April: Nassau caressed her breasts but found himself unable to go any further), where these two girls were brought forward by the adults or even the “elderly men.” Onlookers made explicit gestures, with one of them even using “very singular means” to attempt to arouse Nassau’s sexual interest. 4 Nassau’s walk around the village when, on going into one of the houses, he was surrounded, undressed, and examined and touched intimately (see above). 5 The escapade of Bougainville’s cook (5 or 6 April) who experienced the same fate, but with less solicitude apparently (he swam to shore, before the official landing, was felt over, and once the examination had been made, he was pressed up against a girl, gestures being made to show what was expected of him – absolutely terrified, of course, he could do nothing at all). On each of those occasions, the Tahitians wanted the French to perform the sexual act that they expected of them. This time, as Fesche describes it, Ahutoru also gave a practical demonstration. But Fesche only draws from the attitude taken by Ahutoru toward the officer an additional argument in support of the idea that Tahitian “marriages” always take place in this fashion, that is, “publicly.” And he sees the Tahitians’ attempt to extend this offer of “marriage” to the French merely as “honours they wished to pay to strangers” (or new “allies and friends” as Nassau put it in his narrative). The Youth of the Victims and the Ceremonial Framework The generalization made by Fesche takes up important elements of the forced presentations of young girls. The Frenchman speaks of “girls” and generalizes by referring to “the fathers and mothers who brought their girls” meaning, therefore, that in every case the victim was young. Apart from the generalizing expressions about “women,” which merely express the fantasies of the Frenchmen, both of our French reporters (Nassau and Fesche), when they describe the exact situation of the first presentations, use only the words “girl” and “young girl.” Moreover, in every case the girl was brought forward by others. The onlookers always formed a circle

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and held a “green branch” in their hand. From many concurring sources we know of the ritual role of these branches in Tahiti: they allowed a taboo to be set aside so that one could enter into contact with a superior (Tcherkezoff 2004b: 424–6). The formal, ceremonial aspect is quite clear. There is another element: a piece of tapa cloth might be thrown over the girl at the crucial moment. Therefore it was not a question of voyeurism on the part of the audience with the aim of arousing collective sexual excitement. This further discredits the notion of the Tahitian taste for lovemaking performed “publicly.” It similarly calls into question the theory prevailing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that held that Tahitians made offerings to please the gods in the form of acts of human copulation performed in the open so that they would be visible from the heavens (Moerenhout 1837, Handy 1927; see Tcherkezoff 2004b: 463–6, 474–7). But this gesture also points to something tangible. If we move forward in time and take into account more detailed Polynesian ethnography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we invariably see that the fact of wrapping a person in tapa cloth is always a ritual gesture the aim of which is to call down the presence of the sacred forces from the world of the gods onto the earthly stage and to give efficacy to their actions (Valeri 1985; Babadzan 1993, 2003; Tcherkézoff 2002, 2003b, 2004a: chapter 10).

Neither Love nor Pleasure If we consider our two cases from Samoa and Tahiti, we should note that the presentation concerned “young girls.” The girls were even “very young,” as Lapérouse heard from his officer Vaujuas (Tcherkézoff 2004a: 45) and indeed as Fesche’s physical description of the Tahitian girl presented on 7 April attests. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of all the published narratives and journals for each of these two visits leads us to the certain conclusion that the very first presentations concerned only the “young girls.” The “women” were not involved. Their role was to bring forward the young girls and surround them, and to make sexual gestures – in the same way that they would stand behind the young virgins in the ceremonial dances performed to invoke the procreative powers of the male gods. This they did repeatedly, the most likely reason being that they wanted to explain to the visitors what was expected of them.



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However that may be, the constant references to the girls’ young age must henceforth completely invalidate the main hypothesis initially proposed by the French and then recycled in the form of a Western myth persisting until today: the sexual encounters had not been organized by the Tahitians and the Samoans in the name of love and pleasure. The hypothesis put forward by certain Frenchmen about these young girls being driven to satisfy their desire in the constant search for new lovers is totally untenable for the type of encounters we have seen described when we take into account the girls’ young age and their fear in front of these unknown creatures. On the other hand, if we consider the situation from the chiefs’ perspective, and imagine that their motive for presenting the French with young girls, even ones shrouded in tears, was to offer sexual pleasure to their visitors, we come up against two obstacles. First, this would suggest that the Polynesians had immediately seen the French as ordinary men, but I have conclusively shown elsewhere, drawing on a wide range of examples, that this hypothesis must be abandoned, because it is incompatible with too many other aspects of Polynesian society and culture of that time and as described by the same early visitors.17 Second, one could ask why these men, if their idea had been to please their visitors with a “sexual gift,” would have chosen for this purpose young or very young girls, distressed and physically tense, rather than young women who were just as attractive but more experienced. Young women who would most likely have been less frightened would have been preferable sexual partners and surely a more likely choice for sexual hospitality.18 In Polynesia the person of the young unmarried woman (and who has not given birth), holds an essential place in the “human” collectivity or ta(n)gata. Throughout Polynesia, societies have reserved a quite specific vocabulary for such a person, distinguishing her thus from the child, from the mother, from the woman as a sexual partner, and from women in general.19 But we are still waiting for persuasive evidence that sexual pleasure has something to do with young girls’ distinctive status. All we have is Handy’s unreliable reconstruction (1923, 1927) of a hypothetical Marquesan culture in which, he claims, the overriding purpose of this period of a woman’s life was to collect lovers. Mead followed close behind and thought she had confirmed this for Samoa when she heard her foremost male informant, a young teacher who was rather full of himself, smugly tell her about his sex

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life and his many female conquests. Mead made the grave error of attributing to the two sexes a vision that was an exclusively Samoan male view conveyed to her by this favourite informant.20 This male vision, which one finds elsewhere in Polynesia as well, was itself the expression of the normal fantasy life of young men, one that derived from myths glorifying the sexual appetite of the male gods and of the chiefs. It must be understood within the double standard21 of the male conquest of virgins versus the female preservation of virginity until marriage. An important consequence flowed from this: Mead did not pay any attention to the fact that the detailed account that this teacher gave her of his real or imaginary conquests also indicated that the young girl was often coerced and that she would subsequently have to suffer the reproaches and even blows of her family if the affair became public.22 The Question of Virginity in the French Accounts: The Girls’ Deflowering and Tears Finally, a spectre haunts these texts: that of deflowering. The words for which I have added the original French version in Fesche’s description of “marriages” strongly imply something never explicitly stated, either in Bougainville’s official account or in any of the journals. Let us reiterate these elements: the likely age of the girls presented; phrases indicating that they “made a fuss” before proceeding to the awaited act; the fact that the girl “was crying”; and especially the word “operation” which in French (as in English), when it is used in reference to the human body, implies some kind of serious surgical procedure. All of these things when considered together lead us to conclude that the sexual act offered to the visitor implied defloration. We can see that Bougainville’s 1771 readers, who were presented with nothing but delightful and beguiling scenes and visions, had no conception that the young women of “New Cythera,” whose “only passion is love,” as Bougainville told them, were in fact, in the arms of these Frenchman, not women gaily displaying their flower necklaces and their desires, but girls weeping: girls who were undergoing their first act of sexual intercourse and who were terrified to be thrown into the arms of unknown creatures to whom superhuman powers were attributed. One of Bougainville’s sentences, brief as it is, suddenly reveals that the officers and sailors had not hidden the truth from their captain (who has mostly stayed on board during the visit). It was always, if we take Fesche’s generalization as a guide, or



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sometimes the case that the girl brought forward and presented to the French was a virgin. If at least some members of the expedition had not so remarked to Bougainville, it would be difficult to see why, at the moment of his departure, he wrote, in reference to the peaceable character which seemed to him to typify Tahitian society: “love, the only God to which I believe these people offer any sacrifices. Here blood does not run on the altars [presumably a reference to human sacrifices] or if sometimes it reddens the altar the young victim is the first to rejoice at having spilt it” (Dunmore 2002: 72–3). We now have enough data to definitively depart from those Western illusions and to come back, with more precision, to Marshall Sahlins’s pioneering view: theogamy and not sexual hospitality.

Notes 1 This study was elaborated while I was hosted several times during 2001–02 at the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury, and was presented at the 2nd Western Polynesia and Fiji Workshop (CREDO , Marseille, 2002) gathered around Marshall Sahlins. All my thanks to Dr Stephanie Anderson for her editing (finalized on a much longer version elaborated later, when I was ARC Fellow at the Gender Relations Centre, Australian National University, during 2004–05, which was to be included into a collective work (M. Jolly, S. Tcherkézoff, and D. Tryon, eds., 2009: chapter 4); some changes here have been introduced by me and thus, when a passage sounds more “Frenglish” than English, responsibility is only mine. 2 See Tcherkézoff (2003a: 384) on Tongan and Hawaiian cases quoted by Douaire-Marsaudon (1998: 182–3) and Sahlins (1985a), in addition to the description of Samoan “marriages” (Tcherkézoff 2003a: chapter 8 passim). 3 For this theme in Tonga, see Douaire-Marsaudon (1998: 182–3); for Tokelau, see Tcherkézoff (2003a: 48–9). There are also Samoan legends on this topic. 4 There are very precise descriptions of the Samoan dances of the 1830s in Williams’s journal (Tcherkézoff 2003a: 384–7). In relation to Tahiti, Cook and Banks had noted that the young girls learning and practising the dances had to give up this specialized learning “as soon as they have form’d a connection with man” (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 303–4). 5 The complete account told by Teuira Henry is quoted by Oliver (1974: 414–16). 6 This led to taking a deep interest in gathering and making available sources of “first” and early encounters between Europeans and Pacific

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peoples. A joint program with Anne Salmond was elaborated, supported by the French “Pacific Fund” and French Embassies of Wellington and Canberra. Some results are now available online (www.pacific-encounters. fr), with the participation of the EHESS Branch hosted by ANU (www. pacific-dialogues.fr). Although Diderot himself really only proposed this idea in jest (Diderot 1964 [1796]: 499–501). When Diderot circulated his piece (1772) (unpublished until much later because of censorship), the 2nd edition of Bougainville’s Voyage had just come out in French with a “Supplément” (title of volume 2, which is the French translation of the anonymous first available narrative from Cook’s expedition, published in London in 1771), and Diderot probably found there the idea of his own title. The sexual encounters were not Sahlins’s main topic. In this lecture and in a book published the same year 1981, he dealt mainly with the rise and fall of Captain Cook’s fortunes in Hawaii (Sahlins 1981a, 1985a: chapter 1. Many other works on this question were to follow (see references in Sahlins 1995). The hypothesis of theogamy rests on the hypothesis that Polynesians have seen Europeans as flesh and bone forms of superhuman entities, as images of the gods (but not fundamentally different from the ritual images, elaborated in wood and barkcloth, used by Polynesians in their yearly rites of fecundity). The case considered was how Captain Cook has been assimilated to such an image of the Hawaiian god Lono – and not how Captain Cook would have been just “taken for Lono,” as Gananath Obeyesekere (1992) abusively simplified and presented Sahlins’s hypothesis (see Tcherkézoff 2004a: 109–53). I cannot attempt to show it here, but there are some strong elements, even if few of them, within the narratives concerning early encounters in Aotearoa, Tonga, Marquesas, and Rapa Nui that open the possibility for a generalization of the hypotheses drawn here for Samoa and Tahiti (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 189–97). See pictorial portfolios in Tcherkézoff (2004a, 2004b): Lapérouse refers to the drawing by John Webber (the artist on Cook’s third voyage) of a Tahitian girl bringing gifts of barkcloth and necklaces (we can see the extent to which the Tahitian scene played on Lapérouse’s mind when he visited Samoa). In his book, Bougainville only admitted to having noticed a temporary shyness or hesitation when the girls were presenting “themselves” to the French; but he was convinced that it was ingrained in the “nature of women” always to “claim not to want what they desire the most” (prétendent ne pas vouloir ce qu’elles désirent le plus) (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 128, 203).



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12 The French expression may imply physical pain as well as “sorrow.” 13 This was a ritual gesture that made the way open for stepping into a sacred and tabooed area (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 424–6). 14 As we now know from his own journal. 15 We should remember that the French only communicated by signs, as we know from the descriptions of other scenes. 16 As the French were unable to understand what was being sung, this is only Fesche’s interpretation. 17 See references above n3, and Tcherkézoff (2004a) for Samoa (60–2) and for Tonga, Hawaii, Cook, etc. (109–53), and in relation to the term “Papala(n)gi” used in Western Polynesia (193–6); for Tahiti (200–1). 18 As shown by various chants, all Polynesian cultures plainly recognized the desirability of sexual pleasure for both sexes (and practices involving sexual mutilation were quite foreign to them). 19 As tapairu in Maori or, in Samoan, tamaitai, tausala, augafaapae (in sharp distinction to fafine). 20 Aside from the whole question of how the Western myth about Polynesian sexuality obviously influenced her interpretation in the field, the main thrust of the revised view that we must now adopt in relation to Mead’s interpretation of girls’ adolescence in Samoa bears on gender roles. She thought that she had understood the feminine perspective on sexuality in Samoa, but in fact it was her male informant, absent from the published book but crucial in her field notes, who was her source (Tcherkézoff 2001a: chapter 8 passim). As these girls were constantly “joking-and-lying” (pepelo) when telling her the story of their supposedly free and easy private lives, their discourse (quite at odds with what they were actually experiencing but Mead did not realize it) appeared to Mead to correspond well enough with what her male informant had told her (Tcherkézoff 2001b). 21 I use this expression for the sake of brevity. But it does not reflect accurately the two levels of the ideology involved here. On one level, where the ideology is governed by ideas of family inheritance, the ancestors’ cult, etc., girls as “the relationship to the whole,” feagaiga, are seen as somewhat asexual, while boys, who are all their “brothers,” “serve” them. On another level, according to a universalistic notion of gender dualism and heterosexuality, boys as “males” are supposed to become full males by showing their ability to conquer the “females” (Tcherkézoff 1993, 2003a: chapter 7). 22 I have analyzed and published (in French) the informant’s account (Tcherkezoff 2003a: 366–71); for the original English text of this account, see Orans (1996).

6 Chassé-croisé: Or How Christianity Appropriated Indigenous Appropriation of Christianity on the Rio Negro Manuela Carneiro da Cunha The intellectual influence of Marshall Sahlins is pervasive in Brazilian anthropology. On a more personal level, since his groundbreaking essay “The Original Affluent Society” (in Sahlins 1972) I have counted myself as a devotee. This essay, however, is connected to Sahlins’s oeuvre in two more specific ways. I’ll spell out the first at once and will reserve the second for the end of this chapter. Sahlins has repeatedly made the case for the indigenization of Western cosmologies and for the reconfiguration of Western happenings into Indigenous events. Around a single happening, different events take place for different people, simultaneous yet mostly opaque to one another. Thus, everyone is making history, albeit in one’s own terms. As a counter-reading to the narrative of Western political, historical, and cosmological hegemony, anthropological analysis has mostly analyzed the Indigenous refraction of missionary endeavours. Yet missionary cosmologies are no less interesting than their Indigenous counterparts, and the analyses of missionary refractions of Indigenous discourse are to be similarly studied. Missionaries, after all, carry wherever they go their own potent cosmology. Lowland South American Indigenous people have been noteworthy for their tendency of appropriating foreign intangible as well as tangible goods in a particularly voracious manner. Their all-too-ready adoption of Christian manners and rituals in the sixteenth century



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was perplexing for the missionaries, who were led to condemn them as simulacra, as counterfeit Catholics (Vainfas 1995). Yet, at the very same time, Jesuits were discussing evidence among the Indians of an ancient pre-Columbian evangelization, since the New Testament by definition had to have global reach. Hence, Jesuits appropriated local myths of the Flood as evidence of biblical knowledge, and the traces of (the mythical character) Sumé’s feet on a rock as evidence of the early passage to the New World of Saint Thomas, the apostle. Sumé, it was argued, could well be the result of a linguistic drift from Tomé, which is Thomas in Portuguese (Carneiro da Cunha 1990). Appropriation was and still is a two-way street. The contemporary story I am about to tell in great detail bears witness to the same processes: appropriations and counter-appropriations are the rule for both missionaries and missionized.

News of a Miracle-Working Statue When we arrived to do our fieldwork, reports of a miraculous little statue reached us at once. We had landed in Santa Isabel that very morning, Laure Emperaire, my botanist friend and I, and we were having some fried fish, cassava flour, and beans as the restaurant owner broke the news. We would hear it again and again, retold with small variations by everyone: actually everyone but the priests, the nuns, and a few catechists who insisted on a different story.1 The popular version went more or less as follows. A man far upriver was in his canoe. A young woman was standing on the shore opposite the village. She asked him to take her across the river and overcame his objections that the canoe was much too small. The man was paddling at the prow. When he looked back at his passenger, she had turned into a small statue of Our Lady of Aparecida.2 People in the village wanted to erect a church in her honour, but they lacked money. In order to collect funds, they built a canoe for the statue, affectionately called “Santinha” (literally ‘little saint’). The canoe had no paddles, but it miraculously managed to float on its own downriver, to pass the Ipanoré Rapids and to reach the town of São Gabriel da Cachoeira. The people in São Gabriel put the Santinha and its canoe onto a larger boat and escorted it to the next village downriver. From then on, the statue would stay three days in every community and then

Figure 6.1.  The Upper and Middle Rio Negro basin. Source : Instituto Socioambiental, 2008.



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continue its voyage. In Santa Isabel, a town of some seven thousand inhabitants, the Santinha was feted for three days in each of the town’s seven neighbourhoods plus three days in the town’s main church. It had remained there for almost a month. A month prior to our arrival, the Santinha had left Santa Isabel, and it was now again on her way downriver. There was some uncertainty regarding its final destination: some would say Barcelos, some Carvoeiro further downriver, and some would even say it was due to go down to Manaus, where the Rio Negro ends and merges with the Solimões to form the Amazon River. The greatest variations, however, had to do with the apparition itself: where had the ominous event taken place? Everyone I talked to seemed to come up with a different version. Someone mentioned Nazaré on the Cubate River, another one a place upriver from the Caruru Rapids, still another one pointed to Tunuí on the Içana River, and two people mentioned Querari, the name of both a river and a community on the border with Colombia (see Figure 6.1). It so happened that the priest who had presided over the launching of the statue in Iarauetê had a completely different story to tell, with pictures of the launching to prove it. Father Reginaldo, an amiable Brazilian Salesian priest in his late thirties, had been appointed director of the Salesian mission in Iauaretê in 2005. Iauaretê is a town of some twenty-five hundred, inhabited by Arawakan-speaking Tariano until the establishment of a Salesian mission in 1930, and it is at present a multi-ethnic site comprising Upper Rio Negro Tukanoanspeaking groups (Andrello 2006). Actually, Iauaretê is the only existing town on Brazilian Indigenous land. A special Eucharist Congress was to take place in October 2005 all over Brazil, for the first time since 1980. The appointment of Father Reginaldo was locally commented upon as a move toward replacing foreign missionaries by Brazilian ones (Martini 2009.) There were other important changes going on in Iauaretê at the time. The administration of schools was passing from nuns’ into the hands of Indigenous teachers. Ipanoré, a river rapid where humanity would have emerged on the Uaupés River, was being anointed by the National Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute (IPHAN, Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional) as the very first intangible cultural heritage space in Brazil.3 The effervescence of a revival, punctuated by frequent traditional festivals, was in the air (ibid.). In July 2006 Father Reginaldo,

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who is of a generation attuned to post–Vatican II sensibilities with regard to local traditions, himself organized an innovative Catholic festival that explicitly incorporated folk and Indigenous elements. He enrolled all ten communities or neighbourhoods of Iauaretê and suggested the launch of a castelo (literally, a castle) – a floating balsa structure with votive candles that is sent downriver. Launching a castelo is part of the very popular and traditional Amazonian saints’ festivals that are said to go back to the time of Jesuit missions in the seventeenth century. A viable castelo should go far, and fishermen upon finding one anticipate good luck. Iauaretê had been under the firm control of the Salesians for decades, and people there were not allowed to indulge in what was considered folk Catholicism. That Father Reginaldo would suggest the launching of a castelo testifies to a new orientation. In the community of Our Lady of Aparecida – a mixed neighbourhood established in the 1980 where Tariano live along with Pira-Tapuia, Tukano, Arapasso, and Wanano (Andrello 2006: 131) – an elderly couple offered to lend a private statue of Our Lady of Aparecida.4 The statue was installed on an altar (some described it as a small boat) on top of the castelo. On 25 July 2006, as a closing ceremony to the saints’ festival, the parishioners assembled at dusk at the edge of the Uaupés River and watched as the castelo was sent off downstream. The idea was for the statue to spend one night at every community of the parish, under the care of the local catechist who would then be responsible for having the community hand over the statue to the next community downstream. Iarauaetê parish limits are the Ipanoré Rapids, and because Urubuquara is the last village in the parish, its catechist was supposed to return the statue to the main church of Iarauetê. However, people downstream from Ipanoré, from the adjacent parish of Taracuá, said that they too would like to be visited by Our Lady of Aparecida, and Father Reginaldo agreed to their request. That is where things began getting out of hand. In Taracuá, Our Lady of Aparecida appeared to a man in his dream, and she requested a church to be built in her honour. That was the start of the miraculous career of the statue and that was also the start of offerings. Chests were installed alongside the statue, and the money collected was to be used in the restoration of benches in the chapel of Aparecida in Iarauetê. As other parishes also asked for a visit, ultimately the statue continued its voyage eventually arriving



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in São Gabriel da Cachoeira on 9 October, three and a half months after its launching. It would stay in São Gabriel for a little under a month. São Gabriel is by now a relatively large town boasting thirty to forty thousand souls5 with Indigenous people from all over the Upper Rio Negro accounting for around 85 per cent of the inhabitants. São Gabriel is the only municipality in Brazil where there are three other official languages besides Portuguese: Baniwa (Arawakan), Tukano (Tukanoan), and Nheengatu (an Amazonian lingua franca introduced by Jesuits and based on Tupi). São Gabriel houses the headquarters of an active Indigenous organization. A growing military and a declining Catholic missionary presence, an important non-governmental environmental and human rights organization, a research institute, and a university satellite campus make São Gabriel a significant urban centre with crime on the rise and a diversified set of Protestant denominations and heterodox sects. Father Reginaldo suspects São Gabriel to be the source of what could be called a ritual hijacking. An incongruous ultra-conservative Catholic sect (on which more later) wrote up in minute detail the ritual that was supposed to be observed in Our Lady’s visit and for good measure threw in a book by the sect’s founder to be read during the ceremonies. Both the book and ritual prescriptions were to follow the statue everywhere. Twenty-two communities later, Our Lady entered the town of Santa Isabel on 2 February, 2007, where she stayed until 1 March (Fontes 2006). By that time, Father Reginaldo had been transferred as director of the Salesian mission from Iarauetê in the Upper Rio Negro to Santa Isabel in the Middle Rio Negro. As he received a miraculous image with an unorthodox story and a hyper-orthodox ritual in lieu of the simple statue he himself had launched some six months earlier, one can guess he had to do some soul-searching. Ultimately, he decided not to interfere too much and just added a one-page signed report with the “true” origin of the statue (Oliveira 2006). The report was carefully worded and did not directly challenge the popular belief about the statue having sailed unharmed on its own or about the benefits it could impart, though the word miracle was of course avoided and replaced by the more neutral “grace.” Although this document travelled with the statue from Santa Isabel on, I never saw anyone paying any attention to its story.

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Meeting the Santinha One day after landing in Santa Isabel, we started downriver. I was secretly hoping to catch up with the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida, while my botanist friend was hoping not to have her work program messed up by such unanticipated distraction. I was lucky. Not only had we not already missed the fluvial procession, it was still two villages upriver from Tapereira, where we were going to stay. A few days later Tapereira was busily preparing itself for the visit, and on 15 April the procession moored, after launching fireworks and circling three times in front of the village. In preparation men went out fishing until the catch was impressive enough, and they provided festive decorations. There was a colonnade of palm leaves leading to the school and balloons. Everything else was women’s work: cleaning fish, getting coal, cooking an abundant and varied meal, and later serving guests, cleaning up, and so on. For the Santinha hardly came alone. Families from the next village upriver were supposed to escort her, and a few people from the next stop downriver would also come to honour her. Then, too, many people from previous stops would have vowed (promised) to accompany it for a longer stretch of the river, usually for three or four stops. And then there were the families who lived in their small farms nearby rather than in villages and would not receive a special visit from the Santinha. That made up for an impressive crowd of visitors, whose hammocks would be hung under an old thatch roof nearby. The main statue in the local chapel altar was taken out to the riverbank with great ceremony in order to greet the visiting image. The honour of carrying it fell upon the eleven-year-old daughter of the community administrator or “captain.” Upon disembarking, the Santinha on its litter was carried around by men to pay a visit to every single house in the hamlet. The crowd followed. Having made a complete tour of the village, the Santinha was installed with great care and pomp upon the table at which the schoolmaster usually sat. Local images coming either from the village chapel or from people’s homes were then placed on a small table to the right of the main display where the little statue of Our Lady of Aparecida was standing, with hundreds of satin ribbons attached to its neck. These ribbons were mostly inscribed with requests, a tradition from the Rio Negro down to Pará that allegedly goes back to Carmelite



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missionaries three centuries ago. In Pará, however, I was later told by Father Reginaldo, people make a knot at the end of the ribbon to ensure compliance from the saint. On the Rio Negro, one does not resort to such pressure. Requests and supplications inscribed on the ribbons and sometimes on paper speak to people’s tribulations and aspirations. Some are amazingly candid and their authors can be easily identified. They amount to a public display of private issues: O Mother protect me from all forthcoming evil, give me health, joy, rid me of these vices of mine, tobacco and liquor … help me to live in harmony with my wife. I want you to rid me of my debts so that I can give some money to my mother for her to buy construction materials for our new house. Lady, never allow me to be without work. Don’t let me go unemployed so that one day my mother may feel proud of me. I want you to take away bad thoughts from my children’s heads [followed by the names of her four children]. Other requests are more secretive: “and help us with your grace to reach what we want to build for financial return [sic], have everything turn out well, mother Aparecida.” Almost all of them testify to a very strong bond between mothers and children that is also evident in life histories: “Our Lady of Aparecida, protect my children, rid them of their drunkenness, have pity.” Drunkenness is a regional scourge, affecting mostly men but not sparing women altogether. Boys start drinking hard in their early teens, and from Friday evening until Sunday most unmarried men and a great number of mature and old men are expected to be drunk. Women seem to take their husbands’ and sons’ drunkenness as a regrettable matter of course. They draw a line elsewhere, for they sharply distinguish between men who hit or beat their wives when under the influence from those, ethically acceptable, that refrain from so doing. I have come across two telling cases. One woman adamantly refused to marry the father of her five children on the grounds that he used to beat her when drunk. Another woman only agreed to marry her long-time companion when he promised to no longer beat her when drunk; she assured me he had kept his promise since then. This also implies that marriage is taken very seriously.

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Miracles The Santinha’s power manifested itself in several ways. She bestowed signals, she performed miracles, and she would provide help in the future through relics that stored, so to say, her powers. Signals came up in many guises. She would wink to some people. She would shed a tear for some others. An old Baniwa woman in the village had become Protestant while living in town. Her neighbour told me the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida, looking at her, had shed a small tear that everyone had been able to see, and at once the old woman had gone back to being Roman Catholic. If this is any proof, I did spot the old woman in the chapel. People (mostly sinners and Protestants) would “die” in her presence. I became alarmed at hearing this until I was told the expression referred to fainting rather than actually dying. Our Lady also wanted people to offer gifts with an open heart. She would know when this was not the case, and people would be returned their offerings at night and thus be publicly embarrassed. Storage of her power was important. Under the table where the statue and its boat were set, people put open bottles with water and many boxes of unlit candles. These items were to stay there for the three nights it would be spending in the community. The candles were then kept with care: they would illuminate people once the great darkness sets in and the world comes to an end. The water in the open bottles would have a more immediate use, since it was blessed with several curative virtues. One drop of it would impart a similar blessing to other recipients of the water, so one would always have blessed water available. A woman from the village asked us for a bottle of mineral water: she placed it under the table of the Santinha and intended to use it for treating her eyes. But Our Lady’s power was not only stored for future use. It was also already credited with many miracles, of which most were touchingly trivial. The only other great miracle I heard of – besides the original one, which is the apparition of the statue itself – was that she had stayed unharmed when Protestants, who would not believe in her, set her boat on fire. As proof, I was shown the supposedly charred beam of the boat itself. Another story told about some men who were supposed to be keeping a vigil for the Santinha, and instead they went outside to play dominoes, a favourite regional game. At some point, a dark



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cloud rose from the ground that frightened the men and had them running inside for cover. There were other stories: a man had a brand new padlock but had lost its key. He put the padlock next to the statue of a saint that he had left beside the Santinha for her to bless. A few days later, the padlock turned up open! There was a river peddler (marreteiro) in Santa Isabel. He did not believe in the little statue of Our Lady of Aparecida. The man had a motorcycle and enjoyed riding it while in town. One day while he was visiting a friend he left the motorcycle key in its keyhole. When he came out of the house, the key was no longer there. He thought that was a bad joke from his buddies and was quite angry at them. That night, the Santinha appeared in his dream, and she told him he lacked faith and should not be angry at his friends. The next day, the key reappeared, attached to one of the ribbons around the statue. From that day on, the man believed that the statue was miraculous and for one whole month, while it was in town, he followed the Santinha everywhere.

Domestic Altars, Village Chapels, and Saints A number of themes emerge here that need to be explicated such as dreams, household saints, and Protestants. Dreams are the usual medium used by supernatural entities on the Middle and Upper Rio Negro for a direct communication with Catholics. There are no records of visions or other forms of communication.6 It is in dreams that people are enjoined to accomplish things. It was in a dream that the Santinha first enjoined people to make offerings to her. A significant proportion of such prescriptive dreams today addresses two main concerns: giving up liquor and legitimating a marriage before the priest and possibly in civil law. A Salesian priest reported that after the visit of Our Lady of Aparecida to Santa Isabel, the number of confessions and marriages went up significantly. It is not excluded that such pastoral results influenced the decision not to cut short the image’s pilgrimage. People treasure statues of saints. The village patron saint’s statue will be communally owned and placed in the chapel. Every year a festival will be held in the village on the occasion of that saint’s day, attracting a large gathering from other villages. However, other statues can be privately held, and they subject their owners to the

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obligation of providing an annual festival for them. These privately owned images can be stored in one’s house, on a domestic altar, or entrusted to the village chapel. The importance attached to such statues is clear from the following example. An old Baniwa man I met in the community of Espírito Santo had two statues that came from his wife’s family. When his father-in-law passed away, the two were left mostly unattended. In fact, they actually were inherited by his wife’s brother, but as his brother-in-law was due to leave town (Barcelos), he offered them to him. “I’m not asking for them, mind you,” the man answered with proper decorum. “But I am staying in town.” “Then you keep them,” said the brother-in-law. “But you’ll have to see to their festival.” When the old man eventually left Barcelos himself he took along the statues. Every year, he provides all the food for the “Santissimo” festival, while the ritual itself is taken over by the “festival employees” such as the festival judge, the pole judge (juiz do mastro) or the major-domos, some of whom will be fulfilling (paying) a vow in accepting their roles. Miraculous statues, though individually found, are usually considered as belonging to a specific locality, rather than privately held. When I enquired about precedents in miraculous statues, I was told by one old Baniwa woman in the Espírito Santo community that, many years earlier in the Cassiquiare River, a hunter had found a statue of Saint Solano. He placed it in the village chapel. The next day, the statue wasn’t there anymore – it had returned to the original place where it had been found. This happened several times in a row, and at last the statue was locked up in a prison cell. But the statue again returned to its original place. In dreams, it appeared to the hunter and asked that a chapel be built on the very spot it had been found. By now that spot is a village, and everyone who passes by should disembark and give some offering to it. This story, by the way, bears the classical format of Iberian apparitions as described by W. Christian Jr (1981). Images of saints insist on being worshipped at the place where they were found, and they return motu proprio to their original site. There are stories about miraculous statues that are rather privately held. Two of the Upper Rio Negro Indigenous prophets (on which more below) actually each received the statue of a saint (Saint Feliciano and Saint Dante, respectively) brought down to them from within a bolt of lightning (see Tõrãmu Bayaru (Wenceslau Sampaio Galvão) and Guahari Ye Ñi (Raimundo Castro Galvão) 2004: 661).



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Of course, miraculous statues are the exception by definition, and most statues are just that, statues. Yet people cherish their privately held images. When the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida was brought into the Tapereira community, the other saints from the village, public as well as private, were brought in and set up on a lower stand, to the right of Our Lady. When people were done chanting and kissing the ribbons around the statue they would then kneel before the local statues and kiss their ribbons in turn. The idea is for the local images to receive the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida in a proper fashion, and then have them partake in the miraculous atmosphere, by “contagion” as Lévy-Bruhl would have put it.

The Ritual in Tapereira For three days and three nights in a row and taking turns, people kept a vigil around the Santinha, installed in the open-air schoolroom in her miniature boat over the schoolmaster’s table and facing the river. At regular intervals, several times a day, people would line up with visitors taking precedence and locals following them. The long lines were for devoutly kissing the ribbons attached to the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida. People would start off by kneeling in front of the table deemed to be the “feet,” then before the right side (the left arm), the back (the head), and the left side (the right arm) in turn. After thus kissing the ribbons four times they would turn to the local statues and kiss their ribbons, too, though only once. While this ceremony went on, people would keep repeating the same song for at least half an hour: “Beijai, beijai, beijai com alegria, Jesus Cristo rei da terra, filho da Virgem Maria” (Come and kiss, kiss with joy, Jesus Christ king of the world, son of the Virgin Mary). Other religious activities consisted in reciting the rosary, singing hymns, and listening to mostly terrifying readings about the impending end of the world contained in the book by Bento da Conceição (see below). When I asked the catechist who this Bento was, she told me he was a saint who had direct contact with Our Lady of Aparecida. Some men were all the while busy building a castelo to be sent downriver on the last night of Our Lady’s visit. The castelo was lit with many candles and placed on a boat on which people sing hymns and to whom other singers on the shore respond. It is finally launched from the middle of the river, with its candles glowing in

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the dark – this is quite a spectacular and eerie moment. The script of the launching of a castelo seems strikingly similar to the initial launching of the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida in Iarauetê, which is likely to have been modelled on it. Local women were very busy preparing and serving meals to the visitors. Men but also some young women were mostly playing dominoes at a short distance. Children were happy to have so much company and romance was also in the air for young people. Such gatherings are the occasion for socializing on a scale otherwise unavailable. Three mornings after its first arrival, the statue in its small ceremonial miniature boat was taken into a proper boat wholly decorated in which it was to be carried to the next community. As the heterodox sect prescribed, a Brazilian flag was to be put up at the back of the boat, while a flag from the State of Amazon was to be put up at the prow. A flotilla of boats followed the little Santinha. After an hour and a half, we entered Carabixi and the same ritual followed. The Tapereira catechist formally presented the Santinha to his counterpart in Carabixi and had him sign for its reception in a logbook that some politician in Santa Isabel had offered. The school in Carabixi was decorated with myriad paper flags; however, lacking alternative sources of paper, these festive flags had been cut out of schoolbook pages.

Festivals for the Saints The ritual prescribed by the odd ultra-conservative sect followed to a great extent the annual festivals in honour of the local saints. That similarity was clearly perceived, and whenever any hesitancy about the ritual to be followed would arise, the precedents on which behaviour would be modelled were such festivals. Yet, as a number of people pointed out, there were now two crucial differences. While saints’ festivals are occasions for dancing and heavy drinking, there was to be neither drinking nor dancing during the visit of the miraculous statue. Festivals or festas in honour of the patron saints of a village, neighbourhood, or town are mentioned as far back as the eighteenth century, when the Rio Negro was under Carmelite religious jurisdiction. There are also references to such festivals by the nineteenth-century



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Brazilian poet cum ethnographer Gonçalves Dias (2002 [1861]: 133), and by the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Speaking of the Uaupés establishment described by the merchant he travelled with from Manaus, Wallace found the village to be almost deserted in 1850. He would write: “(Indians) only inhabit the village at times of festas, or on the arrival of a merchant like Senhor L.” (A.R. Wallace 1853: 138). Festivals in honour of saints appear to be very stable over time and have an interesting spatial distribution that seems to coincide with the rivers that were explored in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries while excluding more recently explored regions.7 From the Upper Rio Negro down to the estuary of the Amazon in Pará, they seem to follow the same patterns. The Amazonian writer José Veríssimo (1970 [1878]) describes a festival in honour of the Divino (the Holy Spirit) in the mid-Amazon in 1876, in which the kissing of the ribbons and other details are mentioned. In 1952 Eduardo Galvão was the first Brazilian anthropologist to earn a North American doctorate, at Columbia University, under Charles Wagley. His dissertation deals with religious life in a small town of Pará, Gurupá, and it was subsequently published in Brazil (Galvão 1955). More than fifty years later, thousand of miles upriver, Galvão’s descriptions would be perfectly suitable for Middle Rio Negro rituals. Fluvial processions circling three times before mooring, the launching of fireworks, the use of ribbons, and scores of other ritual habits could be pointed to. While rituals appear very stable, their organizational basis has changed significantly. Galvão mentions lay brotherhoods in Gurupá (which he calls Itá in his book) as sponsoring the festivals and notes their absence on the Upper Rio Negro in the 1950s (1979: 123). Lay brotherhoods were all-important for building churches, commissioning art, and providing services to their members from the late seventeenth century down to the end of the nineteenth century. In some regions of Brazil where Catholic orders such as Jesuits, Carmelites, Franciscans or others were forbidden to enter or were in too small numbers, brotherhoods de facto led the church. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church in Rome tried to regain its authority, a move that in Brazil led to a dramatic crisis pitting the bishop of Pará and the bishop of Pernambuco against lay brotherhoods backed by the imperial (Brazilian) government, and giving a fleeting victory to lay brotherhoods (Carneiro da Cunha 2013). Their disappearance as organizers of festivals is thus another

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sign of the growing centralization of the Catholic Church in the hands of the clergy. Popular or lay Catholicism is thus a permanent challenge for the established church. In the late nineteenth century, major Amazonian intellectuals such as J. Veríssimo (1970 [1878]) would deplore what they saw as the Indianization of Catholicism, going so far as to recommend the extinction of what is today more than ever before the major festival in Belém do Pará, the Nossa Senhora de Nazaré or Círio de Nazaré festival. As for the Upper Rio Negro itself, Catholicism was imparted somewhat in spurts. There were the occasional parish priest visits, two of which left valuable reports. A Jesuit mission aldeia in the midseventeenth century was followed in 1695 by Carmelites who kept a solid presence in the area for more than century after that. However, when Wallace visited the region in 1850, he found only one odd Carmelite, an ex-soldier who professed such a great respect for his frock that he would commit no sins or transgressions while wearing it during daytime. By then (in 1845), the Brazilian Empire had asked for the help of Italian Capuchin Franciscans for running Indian villages. Accordingly, a Capuchin was sent off to the region in 1850 but he seems to have remained only four years. Franciscans settled in the Lower Uaupés in 1880. Although they were welcomed for a while, their excessive zeal led them to sacrilegious extremities. Having obtained ritual flutes, trumpets, and masks from a Tariano – ritual objects that are to be strictly concealed from women – Friars Coppi and Cagnari publicly displayed such a mask first in the village plaza and then a couple of days later during mass. On 28 October 1883, Friar Coppi, on the pulpit, held a cross in one hand and a mask in the other and rhetorically asked his flock, “Tell me, which one is true?” As a result of such desecration, the Franciscans were expelled from Ipanoré by the outraged Tariano and had to run for their lives (Wright 1992: 261) The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century witnessed a scramble for religious provinces in the Amazon among different recently founded religious congregations. In 1914 Pope Pius X granted the Mission Province of the Rio Negro to the Dom Bosco Salesians.8 The Rio Negro Province was huge: 286,498 square kilometres and forty thousand souls. By 1915 a mission had been started in São Gabriel da Cachoeira. Barcelos mission, downriver on the Middle Rio Negro, was started in 1926. Iarauetê, on the



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border with Colombia, was founded in 1930.9 As Salesian fathers (and in 1923, Salesian nuns as well) established themselves, they adopted a muscular program of evangelization that entailed segregating many Indigenous children in six strict boarding schools, which persisted down to the 1980s. They forbade rituals and they forced headmen and shamans into surrendering precious ritual ornaments, boxes, and other regalia. They also had the communal longhouses destroyed. On the Rio Negro, Salesians, however, did it better than other religious orders, having more financial capital – and building strong political and social capital as well.10 There was, to be sure, early opposition by the Indian Protection Service (SPI, Serviço de Proteção aos Indios), created in 1910 by the military who followed Auguste Comte’s positivist credo and positivist church. This influential sector of the Brazilian military vocally objected to supporting Catholic missions among Indians with public money (Melo 2007). One of these men, Alípio Bandeira, actually launched a campaign of attacks aimed specifically at the Salesian missions, to wit his pamphlet bearing the suggestive title A Mystificação Saleziana (The Salesian Mystification) (Bandeira 1923). However, their objections were overcome and, from 1926 until 1936, the Brazilian government kept paying more than half of the missions’ expenses (Archivo Salesian Centrale, Roma A8630701). At that date, the Salesians had five churches, thirty-two chapels, and six health facilities in the province. In 1941 they obtained crucial logistical support from the Brazilian air force. By the 1970s Salesian missions in the Middle and Upper Rio Negro were held by the military in high esteem. It was understood that, by providing a sense of Brazilian nationality and enforcing the use of the Portuguese language in their boarding schools, they constituted a precious line of defence on the Brazilian border with Colombia and Venezuela.11 When, for example, American evangelical missionaries coming from Colombia started proselytizing on the Upper Içana by the late 1940s, with one American missionary (Sophie Muller, of whom more later) achieving great popularity, the Salesians set up a mission on the Lower Içana to stop Protestant attempts at Indigenous conversions. In 1953 SPI, the Indian Protection Service, obliged by expelling Sophie Muller back to Colombia. Protestantism and particularly Pentecostalism is known to have gained significant ground in Brazil in general. However, on the Rio

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Negro basin, so far, the progress of all versions of Protestantism has been held in check by the Salesians. The Protestant Baniwa might be the sole exception. The mission and Catholic boarding school of Santa Isabel was explicitly opened in 1942 to undercut the influence of a Baptist school on the stretch between Santa Isabel and São Gabriel. The Baptist school eventually shut down. In Santa Isabel several small evangelical churches attest to Protestant efforts, but physically they cannot compare to the massive church and the old boarding schools that overlook the river and are quite an impressive sight for anyone coming to Santa Isabel. In 2006 we saw a group of American Southern Baptists who had come to this small town in order to finish building and consecrating a Baptist church. Nevertheless, Protestant churches in the region have not nearly the influence they have elsewhere in the country. In the villages moreover, their influence is negligible.

The Internal Front: Popular Catholicism Indigenous rituals were thus being extirpated with relative ease on the Upper Rio Negro. A far more insidious and treacherous missionary front was aimed at fighting popular Catholicism everywhere in the mission fields. Lay brotherhoods, as Eduardo Galvão noted in the 1950s, were absent on the Upper Rio Negro, but even festivals in honour of the saints promoted by private individuals were shunned by the missionaries, on the grounds of their promoting non-religious activities such as dancing, along with more orthodox Catholic rituals (Galvão 1979: 122–3). Most of the early Salesians were Italian, but several priests from other nationalities joined and replaced them. Like in every religious order today there is a problem of recruitment. As the Austrian father who has been in the region for more than three decades puts it: “Europe is now a land in need of missions.” When I asked about Indigenous clergy, I was told that although there had been several candidates, “they lacked perseverance” and besides – this time sotto voce – “men had problems with alcohol.” I heard about an Indigenous priest who had quit the congregation, but information was fuzzy and people seemed ill at ease on the subject. There was, however, I was told, one Indigenous nun: only one, after fifty years of the establishment of the nuns in Santa Isabel.



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From the outset in the early twentieth century and down to this day, a great effort has been made by the Salesians to select and instruct catechists, have them conduct ceremonies on Sundays and on holidays in the chapels of the communities, and prepare children for their first communion. In January 1999 in Santa Isabel a twentyday course was given by Salesians from all over Brazil to instruct a group of 235 catechists! Regular visits of two or three days are paid to villages by a specially designated priest, although he might skip some villages where he doesn’t feel welcome or where attendance at services is low. All those efforts, however, do not result in perfect church control of the doctrine. In Espírito Santo village, the catechist in charge, who was among the 235 trained catechists, took his duties and responsibilities very seriously. He even organized communal meals after each service. However, not even he found anything strange or unorthodox in the book that had been smuggled in to accompany the miraculous statue of Our Lady of Aparecida. As a matter of fact, he found it inspiring and was pleased to receive a copy of it from a friend.

An Odd Sect The author of the book that accompanied the Santinha, Bento da Conceição, presents himself as a prophet who started receiving divine messages in 1994, in his mature years. He is a resident of the southern State of Santa Catarina, and I still haven’t found out how his doctrine spread thousands of miles from there to Barcelos on the Middle Rio Negro and probably upriver to São Gabriel. The book in question was volume IV of an opus of seventeen volumes and seven CDs! It is titled A Palavra Viva de Deus (The Living Word of God), subtitled Os Ceifadores (The Reapers) followed by a reference to Matthew 13:39, and it was published in Santa Catarina. There is a website, two phone numbers, and three email addresses. Most extraordinary are the miracles God bestowed on Bento. The founding one runs like this: In March 1992 Bento was on Taquarinha Beach in his State of Santa Catarina, and he sat to pray close to a small tree. As a falling dry leaf called his attention, he felt that something was happening. He looked at the tree branches and saw that God was present, for each branch had the form of a letter and together they spelled His Holy Name. He cut the branches and formed the word Deus (God).

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The photograph of that miraculous word stands prominently on the cover of all his books, and one can clearly see the picture on his website.12 Such a miracle was extolled in an endorsement by a priest and with explicit national pride was favourably compared to Guadalupe: The Divine Signature … In Brazil something even more spectacular happened. God left his signature. No Prophet, no Saint, no Mystic ever received the signature of god … (Padre Romulo Candido de Souza C.SS.R.) Another miracle, this one from 5 January 2001, occurred in which angels painted the Holy Face (of Jesus) on the wall, over a column in Bento’s chapel,13 while Jesus Himself sent Bento a message to the effect that this was His direct divine response to those who had cast doubts over the authenticity of the Turin shroud. A surgeon cum painter, described as a member of the Fine Arts Academy, was called in to give a detailed analysis of the painting, couched in technical terms, in which he described the Semitic features of the Face as well as the perfection of the painting technique that no human hand could account for. Among endorsements mostly by some Brazilian and Portuguese conservative priests, one stands out. On 9 June 2003 at exactly 8:05 p.m., the late Pope John XXIII sent a message from the afterlife, recommending to his successor, at the time John Paul II, to accept and recognize Bento’s message and oeuvre and intimating that the end of the world was coming. An interesting detail: he asserted his authority not only as a late pope but, by then, as a (recently and postmortem) canonized saint. The volume that was read aloud during the visit of the Santinha consisted in a series of divine “messages” and regularly started with the formula “My son Bento” followed by a homily. In such divine messages, God sounds like an ultra-conservative Roman Catholic, with an aversion for any Vatican II innovations. He recommends a modest dress code, family prayer, reciting the rosary, and taking communion from the hands of the priest, who should celebrate mass with his back to the assembly. He also speaks extensively about hell (which Bento allegedly saw in what was the source of his midlife conversion) and vituperates abortion.



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When I discussed the matter with an older Salesian, he stated that one could not properly call this a sect, since it did not prevent people from attending church. This curious definition of a sect might explain why the Salesian opposition to Bento da Conceição’s book and his ritual was only moderate at first. However, things were to dramatically change as the statute of Our Lady of Aparecida reached Barcelos. A year and a half after the passage of the Santinha, I was back in Santa Isabel only to hear the most confused accounts of what had happened in Barcelos. Young men had vandalized the boat of the statue, I was told. People wanted to keep it there, someone had robbed the money that had been offered, but it had been found and no one had been indicted. The Salesian bishop had taken the Santinha back upriver. Catholics were clearly embarrassed by the story, but Father Reginaldo gave me a candid account that was later corroborated by the superior of the nuns in Manaus. It seemed that the parish priest was out of town when the Santinha reached Barcelos. The followers of Bento da Conceição, on the other hand, were well organized there and tried to appropriate and capitalize on the statue. The nuns were outraged and hid the chests with the money to preserve the offerings, a move that predictably caused an uproar. Then people from the neighbourhood in Barcelos where the Santinha was wanted the statue to stay in their chapel, rather than in the main church. Against all odds, the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida had never­ theless completed its pilgrimage down to Carvoeiro and had returned to Barcelos, at which point the recently appointed Salesian bishop of the Rio Negro, born in Shanghai and raised in Brazil, had regained possession of it and taken it by plane to Iauaretê, thus hoping to put an end to the whole affair.

Messiahs of the Upper Rio Negro and Appropriation of Catholicism Festivals for the saints cover several thousand miles from the Brazilian border with Colombia and Venezuela along the Rio Negro and the Amazon down to its estuary; however, there is something specific in the religiosity of Upper Rio Negro societies. From the mid-nineteenth century on, an impressive series of messianic movements with different protagonists have been registered in that

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area. It appears that the first such wave of messianism was led by Arawak-speaking Baniwa, and it was able to spread to most of the twenty-two Indigenous societies of the area speaking a variety of Arawak and Tukanoan languages.14 By 1857 Venancio Kamiko, also called Venancio Christu, a Baniwa Indian on the Içana River, started a “Religion of the Cross” that endured at least until the first decade of the twentieth century. Venancio Christu, by the way, enjoined the celebrations of saints’ festivals. Another prophet, Alexandre, came some time later. Then came Vicente Christu, an Arapasso. By the 1920s Uetsu, son of Venancio Kamiko, was leading a renewed messianic movement. Then from the 1950s until the 1970s, Kuduí, another Baniwa prophet, gained ascendancy (Wright 2005). At the end of the 1940s a most extraordinary messianic cult appeared on the Upper Içana. Its heroine was none other than an American Adventist evangelical missionary, Sophie Muller, the adventurous daughter of a Catholic German father and a Protestant North American mother (Wright 1992, 2005). Appropriation of Catholicism in these stories is quite salient. Venancio Christu Kamiko and Vicente Christu, of course, appropriated Christ’s title. Vicente foretold that missionaries would come and reinforce his teachings. Statues of Venancio Kamiko show him dressed in Franciscan frocks, and many of those prophets had resurrection stories modelled on Christ’s. Brazilian Indigenous symbolic voracity, that is, the adoption and indigenization of other peoples’ traditions and religions, has been historically documented since the sixteenth century. There are records of similar stories – the Santidades – dating from the sixteenth century and involving Tupi and Guarani societies on the coast. There, too, as I have mentioned elsewhere, there was full-hearted appropriation by Indians of Catholic themes, symbols, and main figures such as Christ himself, which caused no little scandal among Jesuits and colonial authorities (Carneiro da Cunha 1995, Vainfas 1995). Lévi-Strauss (1991) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1993), among others, have discussed that peculiarity, namely, what could be described as openness to the foreign and a readiness to incorporate it:15 something like an excessive disposition to adopting other people’s manners. Adoption should here be understood not as compliance with other people’s dictates, but rather in the etymological sense of making them one’s own child,



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tailoring them to one’s order, situation, and aspirations. Aspirations are central here, for having access to commodities, foreign wealth, or even achieving foreign identity – becoming colonists and patrons instead of exploited Indians – played a significant role for pursuing such adoption. It is no accident, I think, that from the early colonial period, missionaries in Catholic America found it, on the one hand, exceedingly easy to convert Indigenous people16 and yet, on the other hand, soon found out that Catholicism ran the danger of being instead converted to Indigenous manners (Carneiro da Cunha 1990). Alan Durston (2004), for one, documents the problems involved in recovering control of the translation of catechisms in early colonial Lima.

Counter-appropriations Although appropriation and indigenization of Christianity have been widely discussed topics, the flip side, that is, Christianity’s counter-appropriations have received much less attention. A good example of that two-way struggle for control of symbols is the story of the Cross in Upper Rio Negro. Desana Indians’ narratives published in 2004 (Tõrãmu Bayaru and Guahari Ye Ñi 2004) name the already mentioned, Baniwa Christu, aka Venancio Kamiko, as the inventor of the “Chant of the Cross,” who would have imparted that song to another Baniwa from the Orinoco River, Alicente, and to Tomaso, a Pira-tapuia from a tributary of the Papuri River. Tomaso in turn taught Vicente, a Wanano, and Joaquim Parakata, a Tukano. It was Joaquim who taught the song of the Cross to a lot of different people, Desana, Tuyuka, Karapanã, Tariano, and Pira-tapuia. A Desana, Benedito, taught it to a Maku and to others. But then in the following generation, all who knew the song had died. Three generations passed before a little Desana girl, Maria, emerged. As a toddler, she cried for a drum and a cross, which her father duly provided. She would then sing the “Chant of the Cross” without ever having been taught. After her early death, a Tukano named Cesário or Ñahuri arose. He learned the song in a dream. He preached the same precepts as Maria. He died of old age, and three years later Raimundo, the son of another prophet, José, learned the “Chant of the Cross” in a dream. He was a Tukano from the Turi River. Raimundo was the last messiah of the Rio Negro. It was he who

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erected a cross right in front of his house and performed prodigies. He also predicted the arrival of missionaries and assured people that they would reinforce his teachings. The narrators (Tõrãmu Bayaru and Guahari Ye Ñi 2004) end up enumerating all the prophets of the Cross, leaving out Vicente for some reason: Kamiko, Tomaso, Alicente, Joaquim Parakata, Benedito, Maria, Ñahuri, José, and Raimundo. There is an interesting distinction emphasized between the first group of prophets and the later messiahs. Although there is an uninterrupted line of transmission between Kamiko and the next four prophets, the latter group of four all learned the song by themselves. Raimundo, it is said, erected a Cross around 1910–15. The followers of the Cross indigenized Catholicism in good Sahlinsian fashion. The Salesians fought this appropriation with two strategies. An older one concerned the reappropriation of the alienated symbols. The other followed the Vatican II formula: the Catholicization of Indigeneity. Take the case of the Cross. One might bring in at this juncture – however anachronistic it might seem at first glance – the important medieval tradition of the finding in the early fourth century AD of the True Cross by Saint Helena, mother of the first Christian emperor, Constantine.17 As for prophet Raimundo’s cross, it was solidly planted between 1910 and 1915 beside a stream and thought by the Indians to be miraculous. In 1971 that cross was found buried under 50 centimetres of earth. The circumstances of its discovery were deemed extraordinary. The way an Austrian Salesian father in Santa Isabel told me the episode indicated he thought those circumstances to be outright miraculous. The Salesians duly uprooted that cross and solemnly took it to a series of communities – in a way strongly reminiscent of what happened to the little statue of Our Lady of Aparecida. On Good Friday 1971 Raimundo’s cross was set up inside the door of the Iauaretê church. The message was clearly that the indigenous cross was but a prefiguration of the (True Catholic) Cross the missionaries were bringing. Moreover, it seems that the arms of the cross were cropped – a telling if unconscious symbolic treatment – to fit the measurements of its new emplacement. Later, the Salesians decided to set it up in a separate chapel outside the church. Still later, they decided to set up another cross and try to erect it where Raimundo’s original had once stood. At that point, no one any longer knew the correct spot. However, as people



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were trying to set up the new cross, they found out – a prodigy once again – that the foundations of the original one were just below their feet. Those are the terms in which the Austrian missionary told me the story. In short, a Catholic topos was used to interpret and encompass an Indigenous appropriation of a Catholic symbol, in a fertile and apparently unending dialogue of appropriations and counter-appropriations. Allow me to talk about other counter-appropriations. Many of the ritual and political regalia of Upper Rio Negro societies found their way to a small but very interesting museum in Manaus, kept by the Salesian nuns.18 This fact had been known for quite some time by the Indigenous people of the Upper Rio Negro. The reasons for the missionaries keeping the very ritual artifacts that they asked Indians to surrender, burn down, or abandon in the first place must have seemed mystifying to the Indians. Hadn’t they taught that these were objects from the Devil? Some were also outraged at there being an entrance fee for them to see their artifacts, a practice that was soon relinquished. It was only in 2005, however, that, spurred by a growing sense of heritage, a delegation of the Federation of Indigenous Organizations of the Rio Negro (Federação das Organizações Indígenas do Rio Negro, FOIRN), the paramount organization of Indigenous people of the Rio Negro, descended on the museum in Manaus and asked for restitution. They were backed by both the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and by an important NGO, Instituto Socioambiental.The Salesian headquarters in Rome authorized the restitution of 108 such objects (G. Andrello, personal communication, 2008) which were subsequently repatriated with unforeseen and somewhat terrifying developments.19

Regimes of Religion The above discussion should not induce us to understand folk and official Catholicism as equivalent regimes, raiding each other’s fields. That, I think, would amount to an utter misunderstanding of the differences between the two. Official Catholicism is a religion of sin, and sin is essentially a distance from God. Lack is the keyword of such a religion. As Marshall Sahlins (1996) has suggested, it is a cosmology of incompleteness. Furthermore, it is a centralized institution that is allowed to regulate every realm of people’s lives, as if such discipline were important to God. It is vigilant over

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interpretations, deviations, and heresies. It can cast people out, and it may refuse to baptize and to give absolution. Popular Catholicism in the Amazon might be understood as a very different regime, one that instead of distance and sin, emphasizes close proximity, and the direct interest of God, Our Lady, and the saints not in discipline but in people’s minute worries: a lost key to one’s motorcycle, one’s children’s prospects. It encompasses people rather than casting them out. It brings them into its fold; it puts them in charge of festivals and of tending to domestic images (statues). It also encompasses all kinds of sects, as it does not distinguish between orthodox and heterodox doctrines. As against a religion of incompleteness, it is a religion of adjunction and aggregation. Thus, official Catholicism manifests itself in this story by the control it tries to exert: a benign control such as the letter Father Reginaldo put into the boat of the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida reporting the “true story” of its origin; or a more imperious control such as the bishop’s sequestering of the statue in Barcelos and its disappearance from the public eye. In contrast, popular Catholicism mimics the flow of the river and its affluents: as the Santinha descended, all kinds of accretions were made to its story; different origins were assigned to it, with different versions being equally acceptable and none gaining full authority.20

Social and Spiritual Geography Recall the uncertainty about where the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida was supposed to have first appeared. Social geography is significant here. What places, what stretches of the Negro, the Tiquié, and the Içana do people from the Middle Rio Negro actually know? Not everyone has been to the capital of the municipality: Santa Isabel for the left bank and, downriver, Barcelos for the right bank. It is an odd administrative division, for people in villages that face each other on the two sides of the Rio Negro actually travel in different directions when it comes to registering children and collecting pensions. Knowing the river beyond that largely depends on one’s generation, gender, and occupation. Children and youngsters today tend to know the villages or towns where their grandparents and close relatives are living. Marriage is virilocal, at least for a time, and women will know the villages in which they were reared. As land access for



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agriculture in the rural areas is not an issue and is freely available provided one gets the almost nominal permission from the community leader, people change their abode with relative ease within the region. Fishermen are supposed to know very intimately and in detail every island and every site of the river within their fishing area, which is essentially local. Young or unmarried men will try their hand at some extractive activity such as capturing cardinals, a highly sought after ornamental fish, or collecting piassava, an older extractive activity that still brings in some revenue and has survived even after rubber, Brazil nuts, balata, sorva, and chicle collapsed. The heyday of the extractive economy is definitely gone, however, and with it the three-centuries old practice of “descending” Indigenous peoples. The 1970s were probably the last time that scores of Baniwa, Tukano, Tuyuka, Pira-Tapuyas, and other upriver Indians were talked or lured (or even outright kidnapped) into going down to the Middle Rio Negro to replenish its extractive workforce. Although such work could be seen as seasonal, resettlement would often become permanent. Hence, people in the Santa Isabel municipality today are to a large extent the progeny of those so-called descended Indians from upriver. The village of Espírito Santo, for one, is mostly inhabited by descendants of Baniwa from upriver. The elders still speak Baniwa, which their children claim to understand. Nevertheless, most adults have adopted the old regional lingua franca introduced by the Jesuits, the nheengatu. The grandchildren, in turn, speak Portuguese while claiming to understand some nheengatu. In other words, only very old people have had first-hand experience of life upriver, and very few people have ever had the means of going back upriver beyond São Gabriel to visit their long-lost kin. Going downriver to Manaus, in contrast, and working there for some time is quite common. Hence, upriver is unknown country to most people, even as the names of its villages and rivers are familiar. That the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida is deemed to have originated so far upriver, maybe even in Colombian territory, conjures a regional spiritual geography. One old man, whose parents were Baniwa, declared the statue had first appeared in Tunuí. Tunuí, on the mid-Içana, in Baniwa country, was Venancio Christu’s or Venancio Kamiko’s place. Nazaré on the Cubate River, an affluent of the Tiquié, in Baniwa territory, was also mentioned. Then there was a mention of Caruru,

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both the name of a Wanano community upriver from Iauaretê and another one further upriver in Colombia. There is a double mention of Querari, river or village, where there is a growing Cubeo community.21 What all these latter different places have in common is that they are all far upriver, on the border with Colombia or even within Colombian territory. Colombian territory is today a cultural reservoir for the Upper Rio Negrinos. Tukanoan-speaking groups from the Uaupés who surrendered their precious chests of plumed ornaments to the missionaries are counting on their Colombian neighbours for getting them back. The Tuyuka and Desana have already received ornaments from Colombia, while the Wanano and Tariano are considering a risky and expensive expedition to the Bará in order to trade gunshots for ritual ornaments (G. Andrello, personal communication, 2008). What I am suggesting here is that the attribution of the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida to a number of disparate origins in space reconnects it to various sources of ritual empowerment. What I feel most relevant here, the message of this story is that it gives evidence of a struggle for the appropriation of symbols on the Rio Negro in which the Catholic Church, a heretic sect, and Protestants – as much as local Indigenous people – are involved. There is a chasse-croisé going on: while missionaries of a post–Vatican II persuasion seek to emulate and incorporate “traditional” local rituals, Indigenous peoples try to appropriate the Cross, Christ, and other Christian symbols. Indigenization of Catholic modernity goes hand in hand with modernist Catholicization of Indigeneity. There is a somewhat cryptic homage to Marshall Sahlins in my choice of telling this story, and I might as well explain it now. A few years ago, Marshall told me as he gave me a volume of Anahulu (1992) that he considered that book to be his most important work: Anahulu deals with the history of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and was written in collaboration with archaeologist Patrick Kirch. Elsewhere, Marshall speaks of ascending from theory to the empirical. I take these statements, à tort ou à raison, to mean that our most lasting contribution as anthropologists might be – after all is said and done – data, fieldwork, and the stories they unveil. Just that.



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Notes 1 Fieldwork was carried out through PACTA , “Local Peoples, Agrobiodiversity and Associated Traditional Knowledge in Amazonia,” a joint Brazilian and French research program involving CNP q – Unicamp/IRD  – UR 200/Palos, no. 492693/2004-8 with grants from IRD , CNP q, ANR -Biodivalloc, and BRG, and with the collaboration of ACIMRN (Indigenous Communities of the Middle Rio Negro Association). Research authorization no. 139, Diário Oficial da União (04/04/2006). 2 Our Lady of Aparecida (Aparecida meaning “the one who appeared”) is the patron saint of Brazil, and her original statue itself is considered to work miracles. It was found in 1717, so the legend goes, by three fishermen in the Paraíba River, in southeastern Brazil. 3 According to Unesco 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, cultural spaces associated with practices and knowledge and felt to be part of people’s cultural heritage fall into the definition of what constitutes Intangible Cultural Heritage. At its national level, Brazil keeps a register of Intangible Cultural Heritage Spaces, along with other registers concerning celebrations and skills. The first such Cultural space to be registered in Brazil were the rapids of Ipanoré. 4 The couple in question were Jacinto Cruz, Pira-tapuia, and Eulalia Almeida, Tariana (Erivaldo Almeida, personal communication; Martini 2009). 5 As federal redistribution of tax money to municipalities and schools is proportional to its inhabitants and enrolled students, respectively, it is not unheard of that, whenever they can, municipalities may significantly inflate their numbers. 6 Although hallucinogenic yagé (Banisteriopsis caapi) was traditionally used by Indigenous societies on the Upper Rio Negro (see, e.g., S. Hugh-Jones 1979), its use seems to have declined. In the southwest Amazonian State of Acre, in contrast, it has gained terrain and legitimacy. Whether this is a result of the stronger control exercised by Salesians or not is hard to decide. Stephen Hugh-Jones also mentions dreams among the Barasana as a way to directly contact the He state (247). 7 The Rio Negro was from the seventeenth century on an extractive resource field for the colonists. Yet the main extraction at stake concerned manpower, as Indians were enslaved or lured into “descending” close to colonial establishments (Meira 2000). Rubber and piassava extraction up until very recent times followed the same pattern of recruiting labour upriver, although relocation would now be at a closer range.

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8 The Dom Bosco Salesians are a missionary and educational society founded by the Piedmontese John Bosco (later Saint John Bosco) and were recognized by the Vatican in 1873. 9 These data come from the Central Salesian Archives in Rome, particularly A8630609/1975 and A8630701. 10 It would be worth understanding why Salesians from the same Italian province appeared to be less successful among the Bororo in Mato Grosso and why Salesians from Ecuador were, at about the same time, giving full support to Indigenous movements such as the Shuars’. 11 Two centuries earlier, in 1759, Jesuits were expelled from Brazil on the charges that they did not adequately serve Portugal’s interests. They were suspected of having political plans of their own for the Amazon. They introduced a lingua franca in the region derived from an Indigenous language rather than bringing in Portuguese. 12 The website is archived at https://web.archive.org/ web/20090213173014/http://palavravivadedeus.com.br/livrogrande/ praia.htm. Although Deus can be both Latin and Portuguese for God, it was commonly understood that God had signed His name in Portuguese, and His linguistic affiliation did not seem to deserve any commentary. 13 A picture of this image was posted on his website, which is now archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20090215114817/http://palavravivadedeus.com.br/livrogrande/milagre.htm. 14 Messianic movements in the region have been extensively studied by Robin Wright in his doctoral dissertation and in numerous publications. Unless otherwise noted, he is my source of data on the topic. 15 Long before anthropologists took up that interpretation, an artistic (though ethnographically inspired) thematization of Indigenous cannibalism was submitted. Anthropophagy was introduced in the early 1920s by modernist writers, poets, and visual artists as an icon for Brazilian appropriation, digestion, and transformation of foreign art currents. 16 On that topic and the fickleness of Brazilian Indians’ conversion in the sixteenth century, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1993). 17 Fragments of the True Cross made for highly coveted and widely distributed relics all over Europe, and the legend of its finding was famously illustrated by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo. 18 On the history of this museum, see Andrello and Ferreira (2015). 19 Repatriation was followed by the death of Erivaldo, a leader of FOIRN closely involved with the process. Coincidently, he was the son of the elderly couple from Iauaretê who donated the image of the Santinha. The young anthropologist who followed the events and reported them, André Martini, also died shortly after.



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20 I have similarly pointed to a disparity of regimes in the expansion of orixá-worshipping religions from West Africa to Brazil. The adherence to “traditional” ritual behaviour in the New World obscures profound organizational differences. West African orixá-worship, coterminous with lineages or towns, turned into a universalistic religion in Brazil; conversely, the Catholicism adhered to by returnees from Brazil to the West Coast of Africa was understood to be, in West African fashion, exclusive to that community (Carneiro da Cunha 1985). 21 I wish to very warmly thank Geraldo Andrello and Alicia Rolla who spotted all these places on the map for me.

7 The Past Is Old, the Future Is Traditional: Ircenrraat, the DOT, and the Inventiveness of Tradition Ann Fienup-Riordan I never heard the word “culture” used in southwest Alaska thirty years ago – today it is on everyone’s lips. Conscious culture is the trademark of the new millennium in Alaska as elsewhere, requiring effort to preserve and reproduce past practices and defend them against assimilative pressures. In this struggle, as Marshall Sahlins (2000b: 196) says so well, “the continuity of indigenous cultures consists in the specific ways they change.” This essay explores one such struggle – a debate over road-building – as an example of what Sahlins (2000b: 192) and others have called “culturalism,” that is, the self-conscious, deliberate use of identity, culture, and heritage in gaining recognition of a distinctive way of life. The Arctic generally has attracted scholars most interested in the ingenuity of Inuit survival and the concept of culture as adaptive response. Much less attention has been given to local understandings of heritage and how people interpret and use their own history. The emphasis here will be on cultural creativity rather than ecological fit. It is particularly important to give Arctic flesh to the bones of this argument, as so often non-Native understandings of the Far North have been reduced to the description of subsistence cycles. In 2005 the Alaska Department of Transportation (DOT) began plans to build a 15-mile highway on the Bering Sea coast to connect several Nelson Island villages. The route DOT chose ran directly over the homes of ircenrraat (other-than-human persons) also believed to



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Figure 7.1.  Nelson Island place names. Drawn by Michael Knapp.

be resident on Nelson Island. Not surprisingly, community members voiced concerns about this project. While invoking shared traditions, however, Nelson Islanders do not all come to the same conclusions. Yet if we listen closely, their public conversations provide a modern means for the traditional ends of consensus building and recognition of wider social responsibilities (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2).

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Figure 7.2.  Qasginguaq, June 2009. Photo by Ann Fienup-Riordan.

Tracks on the Tundra The low, windswept tundra of southwest Alaska’s Bering Sea coast presents a deceptively inhospitable face to the first-time visitor. In fact, the land and sea abound with seals, walrus, beluga, herring, salmon, halibut, ptarmigan, geese, ducks, berries, and greens gathered during the annual harvesting cycle. The Yup’ik people of Nelson Island – living in the villages of Toksook Bay, Tununak, and Nightmute, with a combined population of about 1,100 – are able to fill their freezers and storehouses with more than 600 pounds per person of subsistence resources. Because they use powerboats, rifles, and snowmobiles, they must earn money for equipment and fuel by working within the local wage economy. People’s success at harvesting animals is directly tied to their ability to harvest cash. Today money is increasingly hard to come by, and hunting and fishing are often difficult to afford. I first lived in Toksook Bay during the 1970s, doing fieldwork and trying to learn the Yup’ik language (Fienup-Riordan 1983). Since then I have lived in Anchorage and continued to work as a cultural anthropologist in southwest Alaska. Through the early 1990s, the



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projects I undertook were largely of my own making – a missionary history, a book on Yup’ik cosmology, a harvest disruption study, and a book on the popular representation of Alaska Natives in the movies (Fienup-Riordan 1986, 1991, 1994, 1995). Beginning in 1992, Yup’ik community members have invited me to help them with projects of their own, and since 1999 most of my work has been carried out in collaboration with the Calista Elders Council, the primary heritage organization for the Yup’ik region (Fienup-Riordan 1996, 2005a, 2005b, 2007; Fienup-Riordan and Rearden 2012; Meade and Fienup-Riordan 2005; Rearden and Fienup-Riordan 2011, 2013, 2014). In February 2006 I travelled to Toksook for the first time in three years. My excuse was the annual Kassiyuk (Dance Festival), but visiting friends was just as important. During my absence Toksook had built a new community hall, a fifteen-bed subregional clinic, an airfield, three wind generators, and a tank farm, and it had added high-speed Internet access. One project still in the works was a system of roads that the Alaska State Department of Transportation (DOT) proposed to connect the island’s villages as well as the summer fish camp of Umkumiut, three miles west of Toksook Bay. This intervillage gravel highway would be the first of its kind in southwest Alaska. In winter trucks travel an ice highway between the regional centre of Bethel and nearby villages, but otherwise boats, planes, and snowmobiles provide the only means of transportation between the region’s fifty-six villages. When I arrived at Toksook, I headed for Paul and Martina John’s house and received a warm welcome. Before I could take off my coat, their daughter, Jolene, guided me into the back bedroom to show me something on the computer. On screen I saw a mixture of human and animal tracks in an area of bright white snow. Orange tape had been staked around them to keep people from adding their tracks to the ones in the photo. Jolene told me that her uncle, Joe Henry, who lived in a house 300 yards from the Johns, had discovered the unusual tracks in newly fallen snow outside his house. The tracks showed paw prints, which changed back and forth from human to animal tracks, then eventually disappeared. Many Nelson Islanders visited the site to see the tracks, and photographs were later published in the Bethel newspaper, the Tundra Drums (Active 2006). Many believed that the tracks had been made by ircenrraat,

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small people who live in hilly areas and can appear in either animal or human form.

Ircenrraat and Other Persons The implicit distinction between humans and animals in Western thought belies the complex relationships between numerous categories of persons in the Yup’ik view of the world. Many understand the world as inhabited by a variety of persons, including human persons, non-human persons (animals), and extraordinary or otherthan-human persons, such as ircenrraat (plural), cingssiiget (small persons with pointed heads), and qununit (seal people). Appearances are often deceiving. A man encountered on the tundra might be an ircenrraq (singular) in human form. Wolf cubs playing in the grass might be ircenrraat in animal incarnation. Ircenrraat are believed to possess a mixture of traits requiring special treatment. Like human and animal persons, they possess both mind and awareness and, so, merit careful treatment and respect. Ircenrraat are said to live underground and are still sometimes encountered. Stories of those who have visited them describe a world both like and unlike its human counterpart, where a year is experienced as a single day. Although non-human persons often have special traits, they are not considered to be supernatural but rather part of the world that may or may not be experienced. Many detailed accounts describe encounters with such persons. Yup’ik parents continue to tell these stories so that young people will know how to act if they have such an experience. Although sightings of ircenrraat are not as common as they were in the past, their tracks and footprints are still found, along with an occasional tool or piece of clothing. People also sometimes hear the singing, stamping, and thumping of ircenrraat, proof that they are still present in the land. In the past, when the earth was thin (nuna-gguq mamkitellruuq tamani, from nuna, “land,” and mamkite, “flat object that is thin”), encounters with unusual persons were more common. According to the late Brentina Chanar (born 1912) of Toksook Bay (interview, 4 February, 1991): Kegluneq said that her grandmother used to say that long ago when the land was thin, things like that used to appear …



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When it was thin and when it freezes, you know things going on top of it become resonant. You could also easily hear people walking outside. At that particular time, apparitions became numerous, what they call carayiit [literally, “terrible, fearsome things”]. So when the soil was thin skinned, those footsteps would wake them up. Ircenrraat are the most commonly reported of these extraordinary persons. Brentina Chanar stated that they appear as ordinary people. Although she had not seen them herself, she had heard their songs – proof of their reality. Others say they are small people, two to three feet high, and as early as 1899 the Smithsonian ethnographer Edward Nelson (1983 [1899]: 480) described them as dwarves. Occasionally a person encounters ircenrraat as yuut (people) and later sees them as wolves or foxes or other small mammals. At other times humans encounter wolves or foxes who later reveal themselves as ircenrraat. When people encounter an ircenrraq, they may at first perceive it as a normal person. Although ircenrraat can appear anywhere, they generally prefer hilly areas which some people believe are their houses, including specific places like the hilltop knob known as Qasginguaq, about 5 miles northeast of Toksook. The name “Qasginguaq” translates as “place that looks like a qasgi or communal men’s house,” referring to the belief that the knob is the semi-subterranean home of ircenrraat. Many Nelson Islanders revere the mountain for this reason. Although people usually encounter ircenrraat in the human world, some stories tell how a person travelling in the hills happens on the window or door to the world of the ircenrraat. That person might look through that opening for what seems like only a moment but it is actually much longer. The late Frances Usugan (born 1915) of Toksook Bay related (on 22 July 1985) how her older brother, Cyril Chanar (born 1909), heard the songs of the ircenrraat while they were celebrating in their underground qasgi within Qasginguaq. What were those ircenrraat in the times through which we came? My brother, Cyril Chanar, from Qasginguaq he heard drums and singing.

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And when winter came, during the time they had Kevgiq [Messenger Feast], they had songs that were from the ircenrraat. It is said that when one hears ircenrraat singing like that, they always learn them right away. This event occurred when Cyril Chanar was a young man in the early 1930s. Nelson Islanders still recall his experience and the songs he learned there. A person might also visit ircenrraat in their homes, where the human visitor could see his hosts as people. The visitor’s ability to return to the human world depended on his reception. Frances Usugan (on 22 July 1985) shared a story of a nukalpiaq (successful hunter and provider) who was taken into the world of the ircenrraat. He was wearing a patchwork parka made of different animal skins. When the ircenrraat asked about them, he said that each represented the catch of a relative. Worried that the nukalpiaq was a powerful man with a large family, the ircenrraat decided to release him. Three doors led out of their underground qasgi, and he was instructed to exit through the middle door back to the earth’s surface. Had he gone through the lower door, he would have remained underground, while the upper door led into the sky. Some people say that if a person brings something back from the ircenrraat, such as a tool or piece of clothing, it will bring good luck to its owner. Possession of the hunting tool of an ircenrraq, for example, will make that person a better hunter. People may also acquire good fortune by exchanging something with an ircenrraq. Eddie Alexie of Togiak told the story of a man who killed a caribou and then fell asleep. Two people (who were actually ircenrraat) appeared to him and said that they wanted to trade for his catch. When he awoke, his caribou was gone, but the following spring he was able to catch beluga whales, which had avoided him in the past but were an animal form that ircenrraat sometimes assume. Many accounts of encounters with ircenrraat contain the implicit moral that if animals are treated poorly, their “persons” would call the offender to account. The late Billy Lincoln (born 1906) of Toksook Bay related (on 21 July 1985) the well-known story of a man’s encounter with wolves (actually ircenrraat), who took him into their



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underground world. When they finally allowed him to leave, he was told to somersault four times. Sitting up he saw that he had emerged in front of his house, but everything there had become old in his absence. Although he had only experienced a single day with the ircenrraat, he had actually been gone an entire year. Ircenrraat might also take the form of killer whales, and rules forbid hunting or injuring these whales for that reason. Anyone who did so doomed an immediate family member to die. According to Frances Usugan (as told on July 1985): Those down there, the ones they refer to as Kalukaat, at the bend, when we go around them, the ones high up there, they say that they are ircenrraat. And these killer whales, they say they are ircenrraat. And down there at the bend, when a person hears them, after they make kayak sounds, the killer whales resubmerge from near the shore, going out to sea. These are the people of Kalukaat who make kayak sounds as ones who are preparing, even though they have not seen anything, the killer whales resubmerge going out, from near the shore here. Finally, ircenrraat are believed to reveal people’s future, as in this account by Brentina Chanar (from 4 February 1991): Those ircenrraat revealed the future of the village that they will experience later on. When we used to stay at Nunakauyak [the present site of Toksook Bay] and it was fall, when it got dark, your father would go out and come in and say, “There beyond Qemqeng, two lights

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were travelling very fast and then disappeared. And now there is a flashlight coming down on this side of Nialruq!” But when we went out to check, we did not see it. And sometimes, from the end of Qemqeng, we would hear something roaring. And across from us there would be lights, but nothing would happen to us. And now Ski-dos make light going across there and coming down from Nialruq. I used to suspect that [ircenrraat] revealed what was to be and roaring Ski-dos approaching! … It was probably them, revealing what people will do, the coming generation. Indeed, the lights Brentina Chanar observed along the trail leading down from Qasginguaq may have revealed a future yet to come.

Building Roads and Building Consensus on Nelson Island The weekend dance festival drew to a close. As other guests and I prepared to leave, bad weather closed in, and planes did not fly for the next week. On Monday morning I was at the Johns’, listening to casual conversation around the kitchen table. The phone rang, and to my surprise it was a woman from the Department of Transportation asking me to help them out. She said that they needed me to act as their expert to solve the “problem of Qasginguaq.” I told her that I would try to help but that I had no expert capacity or decisionmaking power in Toksook. I said I would visit the Nunakauyak Traditional Council office and see what I could learn. The “problem of Qasginguaq” revolved around the proposed right-of-way and material site for the Nelson Island roadway. DOT engineers had designed the 15-mile road connecting Toksook and Nightmute to run right over Qasginguaq. Engineers also suggested that the knob’s abundant gravel near the proposed road would make an ideal material site, potentially providing gravel for the entire highway project, estimated to cost in excess of 50 million dollars. During summer 2005 field reconnaissance, Braund and Associates (2005a, 2005b) surveyed the right-of-way and identified the potential historic and prehistoric value of small rock structures on Qasginguaq, including three rock cairns and a circular stone structure. Further conversations with Nelson Islanders revealed that the cairns were recently constructed, probably by young people. David



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Hooper of Tununak reported that the stone circle was made by National Guardsmen during training exercises on Nelson Island. Nelson Islanders did not consider either of these structures, created from loose surface stones found on the hilltop, as historically or culturally significant. During discussions about these stone structures, however, it became apparent that while Nelson Islanders do not give them cultural significance, they do place considerable value on Qasginguaq itself. Prompted by their practical need to document the traditional significance that contemporary Nelson Islanders place on Qasging­ uaq before preceding with the Nelson Island roadway, DOT had tracked me down and given me a call. I knew all this before the phone call, as ircenrraat in general and Qasginguaq in particular had been the topic of many conversations during the previous week. I walked to the traditional council office, where I told Jolene John – who worked as the tribal administrator – about the call from DOT. She, in fact, had recommended that they contact me. I mentioned my reluctance to say anything to DOT unless it reflected community views. Jolene agreed and told me that a Toksook town meeting fortuitously was scheduled for that afternoon. She suggested putting Qasginguaq on the agenda, and made several announcements in Yup’ik over the CB radio to encourage community members as well as Nightmute people who had stayed overnight following the dance to attend the meeting. I was given permission to record the discussion, which was carried out in the Yup’ik language. More than forty men and a handful of women gathered at the new community hall. Elders sat at the back of the room, and middleaged men and women farther forward. Boys from the high school basketball team later filed in and took places in the front row, but said not a word. The presence of men and boys in this public space mirrored the past. Through the 1930s, boys lived and worked in the qasgi, where they received practical training from community elders as well as oral instruction, viewed as the moral foundation of a properly lived life. Qasgit (plural) continued to be used into the 1950s. With the introduction of single-family dwellings and formal education, however, they were no longer the primary places where men lived and worked together, educating their younger generation. The town hall meeting evoked this traditional context both in form and content. The community hall became “like a qasgi”

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when elders and young people gathered there, and this referent grounded everything they said. At the outset Toksook Bay Tribal Council President David Tim emphasized that DOT would respect the opinions of community members. He stated, “Those who are working on [the road] are relying on us because we know things from the past; they do not want to do something without having asked us, since we know the route of the road. Because they are doing that, we Yupiit [Yup’ik people] are the determining factors.” Community members, in turn, deferred to elders present at the meeting and gave their advice priority. Testimony confirmed residents’ views on the continued presence of ircenrraat on Nelson Island and their close association with Qasginguaq. Mark John stated, “Since I have come to exist, they have mentioned Qasginguaq many times. And when I was able to go by dog team, whenever I went near it, I used to think about it being the land of the ircenrraat. If an area close to Qasginguaq is devastated, it might be disturbing, knowing the ways of our ancestors. It is included in stories, and Yupiit know that Qasginguaq up there as a significant landmark.” Toksook Bay elder James Charlie agreed: Our ancestors, before we started talking about God or heaven, said that a person who dies goes to a designated place here in Nelson Island. They go to Kalukaat and also farther up from Tununak, and so they go there and become ircenrraat. And that Qasginguaq, just like Mark said, it is like a “spiritual site” or a “sacred site.” From time immemorial our ancestors have said that not only Kalukaat but also some places on the side of the mountain are the lands of ircenrraat. Toksook Bay Traditional Chief Paul John (born 1928) also identified ircenrraat with killer whales, as Frances Usugan had twenty years before: “They say the Kalukaat are the original place of the killer whales. They call the rocks on the steep part on top of our mountain Kalukaat. They have been the land of the ircenrraat for centuries. They are killer whales … and they sometimes make thundering sounds when something is going to happen.” Camilius Tulik of Nightmute agreed: “When they had a qasgi in Umkumiut, they prohibited us from bothering those killer whales. When they were talking about ircenrraat at Qasginguaq, they also talked about those



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killer whales. Those black killer whales belong to Qasginguaq.” Thomas Jumbo, also from Nightmute, described the door by which killer whales disappear into the land: “There is a door just this side of Ulurruk. So these killer whales are ircenrraat. Even though they submerge near the edge of the shore, they go in [to the land]; that is their house, it is their village.” During the meeting consensus emerged that Qasginguaq was a traditional landmark and culturally valuable site and should be protected. Participants also recognized the importance of the new road. Camilius Tulik stated: I have lived in this place called Nelson Island ever since I was small and nowhere else. All of us here on Nelson Island know and have heard about these they call ircenrraat. Whatever we are going to use, they say that ircenrraat use them first. So what [ircenrraat] pointed out is indeed true. But I am in support of [the road]. This road will be used by those who come after us here on Nelson Island. Paul John agreed: “That road may be okay if the bottom [of Qasginguaq] is not destroyed, if they bypass Qasginguaq.” Mark John added, “If they disturb the land, I do not want them to take gravel from close [to Qasginguaq]. I want them to take gravel for the road from far away.” Again, James Charlie voiced his support of this position, noting that the road is important, but that Yup’ik ways must also be preserved. It would be okay if the road could be on this side [of the mountain]. But the ones who know about it should be asked about how far from [Qasginguaq] it should be built, I think that will be better. This road will undoubtedly help us but our ways should not be sacrificed, especially our traditional values. It is possible to [build the road], so instead of getting gravel from the top of [Qasginguaq], it might be better to get it farther away from it, keeping in mind our ancestors. Camilius Tulik concluded, “I wanted to talk to you about how we will all use that road. At Nightmute they said that if they are going to take [materials] from near Qasginguaq, it should not be close. If

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we work on it collectively, we will do it properly. It will be fine if it is done like that, by talking about it like this beforehand. So write to those people saying that is the way they want to do it.” Having confirmed (1) that Qasginguaq was a culturally significant site and (2) that the new road should be built without disturbing Qasginguaq, discussion turned to the question of how far the road should be built from Qasginguaq. Participants discussed the matter at length and agreed that the road should be built as far away as possible on the downhill slope away from Qasginguaq and no closer than 1,500 feet from the perimeter of the knob, located approximately 2,000 feet from the hilltop. Finally, Charlie Moses of Toksook Bay suggested a possible new material site behind Qasginguaq: That future road that will come from Nightmute will go by in front of Qasginguaq. It will go inland when it nears Qalulleq [River], and it will cross [the stream] toward its source. From that point, they could go to that material site starting from its inland location. It will be better if it went that way. Instead of getting [road material] from near Qasginguaq, they could go to that material site up there when they start to take rocks. It could be like that. Phillip Moses agreed with Charlie Moses’ recommendation: “That small hill at the source of Qalulleq will be filled with rocks. That hill just at the source of Qalulleq is not small. It is under Qasginguaq, down from the proposed road. If it has good rocks, even if it is used, it will not be missed if it is gone. But it will be a reason to be grateful.” Camilius Tulik concluded: “So if we come to one mind [in agreement], it will be ideal.”

Traditional Landscapes from Contemporary Yup’ik and Non-Yup’ik Points of View Although discussion at the Toksook town hall meeting clarifies some points, much was left unsaid. Building consensus regarding Qasginguaq was as complex as building the road itself.



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People agreed that Qasginguaq is a location possessing longstanding value. It is the site of past encounters with ircenrraat, who many still believe make it their home. The ancestors of present-day Nelson Islanders, including the late Cyril Chanar, saw and heard ircenrraat at Qasginguaq, and their encounters are still widely known. Contemporary Nelson Islanders, including Traditional Chief Paul John, have observed lights and other activity by ircenrraat at Qasginguaq from a distance. Today, looking northeast from Toksook Bay, Qasginguaq appears on the landscape in the same form as it has for centuries. It is an easily recognizable knob, highly visible from the village. Travellers have piled surface rocks into several small cairns and low structures, but no one has dug below its surface into the ircenrraat’s underground home. Contemporary recognition of ircenrraat as active agents present on Nelson Island provides strong evidence of the continued relevance of Yup’ik understandings of personhood. All persons – human, non-human, and other-than-human – are believed to possess awareness and merit respect. A Yup’ik adage captures this shared personhood: “Ella-gguq allamek yuituq” (The world, they say, is occupied by persons and no others). This qanruyun (instruction) eloquently underscores both the common kinship between humans as well as the common personhood of all creatures. Although most Nelson Islanders share a common view of personhood, they come to different conclusions. Some oppose roadbuilding on the island, not only because of negative effects on the land and those who live within it but also its potential impacts on human communities. The new road may lead to consolidation of services, closure of schools and clinics in Tununak and Nightmute, and forced reliance on centralized facilities at Toksook. Most Toksook residents oppose such centralization, for good cultural reasons. Toksook has a Yup’ik immersion program in its elementary school, and residents actively support use of the Yup’ik language in many contexts. Tununak and Nightmute do not have Yup’ik immersion programs in their schools, and their young people increasingly speak English. Although near neighbours geographically, the three Nelson Island villages have very different visions of themselves and their futures. Toksook, for one, prefers independence in the name of cultural survival.

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Toksook residents recently have been joined in their resistance to the road project by representatives of the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Nelson Island is part of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, in which more than a million ducks and half-amillion geese breed annually (US Fish and Wildlife Service 2002). Refuge managers are concerned that the traffic and noise of road construction and use will cause environmental damage in the birds’ sensitive nesting grounds. Yup’ik resistance to USFWS regulation of waterfowl hunting is long-standing and well documented (Fienup-Riordan 1999). In brief, non-Native wildlife biologists tend to view the birds as scarce resources requiring management, whereas Yup’ik hunters view them as persons who can legitimately be hunted anytime they present themselves. Many Nelson Islanders believe that like all animals, birds observe what is done to their carcasses and communicate with others of their kind. Whereas non-Native biologists advocate limited hunting as a remedy for declining bird populations, Yup’ik hunters continue to view the relationship between humans and animals as collaborative reciprocity by which animals give themselves to humans in response to respectful treatment as persons (albeit non-human) in their own right. Mike Uttereyuk, Sr (interview, March 1995) of Scammon Bay described hunting for geese north of his village: After we killed lots in one year, there would be a lot more returning the next year. That was how it was … Today, since we don’t catch as much as we used to, the population of geese has declined. The amount of geese we kill is usually replaced. If we killed lots, they would be replaced by many more when they returned. That was how it was! Because white men are keeping a close eye on them … they are making the goose population decrease. Uttereyuk’s conclusion – that the recent population decline is the direct result of limited harvests – highlights a fundamental conflict between the Western scientific view of geese and that held by many contemporary Yupiit. Wildlife managers maintain that overhunting and overharvesting are major factors contributing to the decline of goose populations along the Bering Sea coast (Sedinger et al. 1993). For Uttereyuk and many of his generation overharvesting by Yup’ik hunters is not to blame but rather the limited harvests that insult the geese, causing them to go elsewhere.



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In the context of this long-standing debate, it is remarkable for some Nelson Islanders to join forces with non-Native refuge personnel. It is, however, a pragmatic partnership. In choosing to work with the biologists Nelson Islanders are not forsaking their traditional view of personhood but accepting support from non-Native conservationists whose practical concerns overlap theirs. On the other side of the debate are Nelson Islanders (especially Nightmute residents) for whom the new road will halve the miles to open water for seal hunting and fishing – traditional activities performed today with the help of modern tools. Not only will the new road cut fuel bills (gas is up to $6.00 a gallon in the village), the sale of gravel (located on village corporation land) and the use of local labour during road construction will help the village economy. Residents assume that the state will contract with locals for road maintenance as well. This position does not negate belief in or disrespect for ircenrraat, as Camilius Tulik reasoned, “Ircenrraat never told us not to.”

A Person’s Mind Is Powerful The emphasis above has been on the broad conceptualization of personhood to include other-than-human persons. According to this view, human persons also require careful treatment. To guide people in their relations with each other, the Yupiit codified detailed qanruyutet (instructions) for the culturally appropriate living of life (Fienup-Riordan 2005a). Although the multitude of qanruyutet took a lifetime to learn, they can be thought about in terms of a small number of basic rules flowing directly from the Yup’ik concept of a powerful mind. The foremost admonition was for a person to act with compassion, sharing with and helping those in need. “Those who share,” they say, “are given another day.” Second, people were taught to control their own thoughts and feelings, avoiding private conflict and public confrontation. As they say, “Braid your anger in your hair so that it will not become loose.” These two admonishments  – to act with compassion and restraint  – reflect neither selfless altruism nor passive acquiescence. Rather, both are a direct response to the Yup’ik understanding of the positive and negative powers of the human mind. To act with compassion elicits the gratitude of those one helps and brings the power of their minds to bear on one’s future success. To act selfishly or in anger, on the other hand, injures the minds of one’s fellows and

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produces dangerous negative effects. This immediate and tangible reciprocity is at the core of Yup’ik social and emotional life. Theresa Moses elaborated (on 5 June 1995) this relational morality and the power of a person’s emotional response: They say a person’s gratitude is powerful. They say their feelings of humiliation are also powerful. They taught us how to use discretion among our fellows and try not to say things that might hurt their feelings. They’d say that a person’s feelings of gratitude and humiliation were very strong. When someone does something that makes me very grateful, sometimes the only thing I can do is to hope for their well-being. Sometimes my feelings are so strong, I weep. Since a person’s gratitude is truly powerful, his feelings of humiliation are also profound. When we were offended, instead of becoming haughty, we were taught to have self-control. The view of society Theresa reflects is fundamentally relational rather than individualistic. A person is not first and foremost an individual who “relates” to others as a secondary activity. Rather, a Yup’ik person comes into the world as part of a complex web of kinship, including both human and non-human persons. One always considers these others and, for better or worse, reaps the consequences. The deference and respectful treatment of fellow community members that were the defining characteristics of the Toksook town hall meeting reflect this view. Decision making on Nelson Island was in the past and continues today to be consensus based. No outside expert can resolve issues for Nelson Islanders, but public discussion can facilitate coming to practical agreement in a respectful manner.

The Future Is Traditional The Toksook town hall meeting mirrors “culturalism” worldwide. Elders today embody past authority, talking in a new venue about traditional values that continue to animate relations between people, animals, and the land. Their efforts represent “a permutation of older forms and relationships made appropriate to novel situations” (Sahlins 1999c: 408). In southwest Alaska, as elsewhere, local differentiation and expressions of cultural distinctiveness have accompanied global integration and homogenization. Sahlins (399) argues



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persuasively against “the easy functional dismissal of people’s claims to cultural distinction (the so-called invention of tradition) and for the continued relevance of such distinctions (the inventiveness of tradition).” Nelson Islanders would agree with him. The elders’ vigorous speech regarding both ircenrraat and Qasginguaq is much more than backward-looking conservatism or nostalgia for the past. Their oratory, both “authentic” and “innovative,” displays a new self-consciousness and increased awareness of how they and their descendants are both like and unlike the encapsulating kass’aq (non-Native) majority, a dialectic of similarity and difference that is the hallmark of every “living tradition” (Sahlins 1999c: 411). Stressing the importance of holding onto one’s traditions, and working together “with one mind,” their contemporary narrative references to the past are active efforts to shape the future – a future in which they envision Yup’ik traditions as playing an important part. One final irony is noteworthy in this regard, testament to the complicated roles we anthropologists increasingly play. Following the Toksook town hall meeting, DOT asked me to write a report clarifying what Nelson Islanders had said. If Qasginguaq had cultural significance, they needed to know before moving ahead with their project. I wrote the report on behalf of the Nunakauyak Traditional Council. Council members were hopeful that what elders had shared would result in the designation of Qasginguaq as a Traditional Cultural Property (TCP) under the federal register. Such a designation – to date only bestowed twice in Alaska – would protect it in perpetuity from road building and future development projects. The value they placed on Qasginguaq could only translate into its designation as a Traditional Cultural Property if the DOT had that information in black and white. Using elders’ testimony I was able to make a strong case for the continued cultural significance of Qasginguaq. DOT presented the report to the Alaska State Department of History and Archaeology, and Qasginguaq was, in fact, declared eligible as a Traditional Cultural Property, the first step in the designation process. This was good news to Nelson Islanders, who wanted Qasginguaq protected, and to the DOT, which wanted to build the road. Once the site’s eligibility was established, DOT was required to treat it as a fully designated Traditional Cultural Property. DOT could now move forward with their project, which had been on hold while the status of Qasginguaq was

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in limbo. Declaring Qasginguaq eligible as a Traditional Cultural Property in effect paved the way for the new road. Nelson Islanders’ decision would be respected: If the road were built, Qasginguaq would be protected. In the state and federal regulatory process, the future is Tradition, writ large. In the end, the Toksook town hall meeting and its aftermath provides one of numerous examples of cultural revitalization and self-awareness. While many predicted that globalization would put an end to distinctive traditions, instead Indigenous people all over the globe have sought to appropriate the world in their own terms (Sahlins 2000b: 192). In southwest Alaska as elsewhere, expressions of cultural distinctiveness have grown up alongside increased global integration. For all their new connectedness – a state-ofthe-arts clinic, Internet access, direct air service to Anchorage – the continued relevance of traditional admonitions, many feel, cannot be denied. As Sahlins notes, the contemporary emphasis on traditional values reflects both ethnonationalism and political activism among numerous Indigenous peoples, including the Yupiit. Elders like Paul John and Camilius Tulik have strong political agendas, seeking not merely to revive selected practices but to vindicate them after a century of dismissal and condemnation. Here again Yup’ik elders are not unique but rather join Indigenous peoples worldwide who selfconsciously counterpoise their traditions “to the forces of Western imperialism … not merely to mark their identity but to seize their destiny” (Sahlins 2000b: 163). The Toksook town hall meeting not only discussed specific traditions surrounding Qasginguaq, but also revived the creative context of Yup’ik oratory, providing a public space for elders to perform their traditional roles as speakers and teachers. This instrumental character was reflected not only in the content of what elders said, especially their persistent references to traditional values and ancestral ways, but the meeting’s public form. Gathering together and openly speaking about their past, elders were actively endeavouring to shape their future. Many cases of cultural revival are spearheaded by younger men and women who champion “tradition” at odds with parents who had “accommodated to the white man and internalized the latter’s reproaches” (Sahlins 2000b: 198). But in this case, tradition-bearing elders on Nelson Island are truly leading the charge, as they



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have retained both knowledge of their past and a passionate desire to communicate it. For them, as for Indigenous leaders elsewhere, “culture is not only a heritage, it is a project,” a demand for specific forms of modernity that can only be fulfilled if the next generation shares their view of the world, that is, their culture (200). Elders at the town hall meeting discussed their differences in a group setting, as was traditional, based on their own personal experience: “I tell what I know.” Like good “afterologists,” Sahlin’s (1999c: 404) term for postmodern, post-colonial, post-structuralist thinkers, they made no claims to completeness or to imparting the one true faith. Their sense of their own culture was neither essentialist nor bounded, and the emphasis was not on presenting a unified, homogeneous, systematic view (as in some instances of cultural revival and renewal). Elders met together to talk about their past. They described their own experiences and listened to others. Knowledge was not viewed as the property of particular individuals but a shared experience gained in one’s engagement with the world and with each other. Nelson Island elders continue to see themselves as living in a world of local, face-to-face relations radically different from the national and anonymous relations that characterize the non-Native world. They view the DOT’s Traditional Cultural Property designation as a means to an end, not an end in itself. In their world, compassionate personal relations, including talking to young people and to each other, are the real keys to cultural survival. Their words continue to have value. At the end of the town hall meeting, younger Nelson Islanders expressed their gratitude to the elders for what they had shared, thoughtfully remarking that someday in the future they would be the ones talking to the younger generation. In fact, the future is now. Over the last decade, regional organizations and programs have put increasing emphasis on community and regional gatherings where both elders and young people speak out. At these gatherings elders publicly discuss practices hidden from the view of a generation of younger Yupiit, and their oratory continues to have moral weight. Issues of environmental transformation continue to be subtly contested on the Bering Sea coast, where the Nelson Island road project promises to reshape landscape in unprecedented ways. What some non-Natives (and Yupiit) view as acceptable progress – “Ircenrraat never told us not to” – some Yupiit (and non-Natives)

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view as potentially dangerous disturbance of the habitations of other-than-human persons with whom they coexist in a sentient world. If state funding becomes available, the road will probably be built. Until then, community discussion will continue. The tracks under Joe Henry’s window provide local evidence that ircenrraat inhabit the world, and the actions of ircenrraat may affect those who encounter them. Nelson Islanders also take responsibility for ircenrraat. Ethical practices on Nelson Island continue to be conceived in terms of this larger social framework, including human and non-human persons. Community debate on the transformation of their landscape continues to be guided by a relational ethic all but invisible to US Fish and Wildlife Servies and Alaska’s Department of Transportation. This debate is neither about conservation, as understood by USFWS biologists, nor development, as defined by DOT. At the Toksook town hall meeting, men told stories of ircenrraat, not as history lessons but as evidence to remind fellow humans of their wider social responsibilities. Acknowledgments I am indebted to the Nunakauyak Traditional Council for permission to attend and record their town hall meeting, and to share the results of what I learned. Thanks to David Chanar of Toksook Bay for his translations of elders’ accounts. And special thanks to Alex Golub for the invitation to contribute to this volume in honour of the anthropologist and teacher I most respect and admire.

8 The Kafka Connection: Structure, Lifeworld, and the Cunning of History Jonathan Friedman Marshall Sahlins has been one of the few anthropologists and certainly the most celebrated to have continued the tradition of argument and scientific reason that has been in large part abandoned in recent years by so many intellectuals. The tradition, if I may use such a dangerous term, consists in finding structure in reality. All structure is underlying insofar as it is not obvious “to the most casual observer.” It takes a great deal of work to arrive at structural understanding, and even then it is always in the form of hypothesis that is contestable. This is the burden of true science, the unremitting knowledge that one may be wrong. It is only possible when scientists are brave enough to admit to being wrong, usually on the grounds that they can eventually develop a better understanding of the world in the long run. This is surely the core of scientific strategy in the most general sense, an elaboration of trial and error. And Lévi-Strauss would certainly agree, as Sahlins has himself revealed in an interview, when the former stated that of course structuralism ought to be applied to infrastructures and not merely to superstructures. “Just what is structuralism?” “Enfin,” Lévi-Strauss said, “c’est la bonne anthropologie” (Sahlins 2008e: 322). And the usage of the term, if it is to simply be “good anthropology,” refers to a notion of underlying reality, not immediately visible, that is constructed by the anthropologist to account for apparent reality, that is, reality as appearance. It assumes that structure refers to the relational properties of reality, properties that

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are non-empirical in the sense of visibility but quite real, as real as gravity. It is Sahlins’s fearless creativity that is the source of the profound contributions that have transformed the nature of anthropology during the past decades. There have been anti-structuralist movements in anthropology as in other disciplines, but in most cases structuralism has been understood in more culturally specific terms, as superstructure, the structure of representation, as a kind of determinism that seems distasteful to those intellectuals who feel hemmed in by what appear to be forces beyond their control, who long for freedom from all of that. Foucault, who was more of a structuralist than the poststructuralist he has posthumously come to be, is invoked in their vision of language as the totality of the real to be revolted against, even in theory, especially in theory. The paradigm here is Judith Butler (1990, 1993), who seems to see her work as a struggle against definitions and categories, against gender and even sex itself, since all there is, to simplify her approach, are performances, all the rest being externally imposed by the political forces in control of social categorization. There have been since the 1980s a spate of actor-oriented, ethnography-is-all, textualisms inspired by Paul Ricoeur, and new anthropologies or rather ethnographies, since anthropology includes theory that is to be rejected as just more folk-models. Some have seen this shift away from structuralist accounts and all explanation as an expression of another wave of individualization riding the crest of the larger wave of neo-liberalism. Structure, then, is not compatible with my freedom, so it must be banned with all other forms of systemic understanding. And into all of this has been inserted a culturalist globalization vogue borrowed from cultural and postcolonial studies that is totally unconcerned with the structures of real life and more concerned with moralizing statements about the progressive and even evolutionary nature of globalization itself, as opposed to those backward-looking anthropologists who still believe that there is a “local” reality to be understood in its own terms and that some people (dangerous reactionaries) actually defend. This is why globalization proponents have been so negative to global systemic attempts to come to grips with contemporary and historical realities. Is this not a process of the terminal individualization of social thought, what Bruce Kapferer refers to as “the retreat of the social” and here, paradoxically in the name of the global, when, following



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the great global war between diasporas and the nation-state we shall all be free (Appadurai 1996: 21–3)? For, according to Appadurai, “In the longer run, freed from the constraints of the nation form, we may find that cultural freedom and sustainable justice do not presuppose the uniform and general existence of the nation-state” (23). The argument proposed here is that the structural analysis of our own contemporary state- based realities is an important exercise that creates a needed distance from those realities while demonstrating a coherence in reality that is denied in much recent work. This is not a general coherence identical in each society, but the coherence of a family of related forms. This is also an initial effort in which I cannot do much more than suggest what seem to be the possible underlying logics and their particular manifestations. They imply a need for more ethnography, not an ethnography of segregated realities but one that strives to see the connections among disparate phenomena. The aim is to begin to understand the nature of political cultures of modern states and to understand these in their social contexts. There are not mere logics of bureaucracy, of state regulation, or of the formalities of governmentality, but rather of the practical forms of sociality involved in the exercise of state power. The latter are thoroughly cultural insofar as they reveal sets of specific properties that can be understood not only as aspects of particular power structures, but also of more general schemes of sociality. The work of Marshall Sahlins is crucial in the current exercise since he is foremost among those who have engaged the structures of political realities and the cultural logics of power, not least state power. His insistence on not reducing anthropological analysis to the voice of the Native, of maintaining an external perspective as well, invoking Bahktin’s notion of extopy (Sahlins 1997), is fundamental for the kind of analysis suggested here. My approach is initially savage or at least undisciplined insofar as I take certain event chains as the point of departure. Thus, the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands are paths to the understanding of the organization of the political field of that society that can be engaged in some form of Sahlins’s renowned “method of uncontrolled comparison” to shed light on the way in which different national political arenas can be understood as variants of one another. The “Kafka” in the title of this piece refers to that aspect of social life that makes structuralism

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possible, the fact that free will and intentionality are largely already constituted within cultural frames of reference, that is, they are specific and immediate to the actors who act on free will without their wills being free. This is the tragic aspect of social life in the formal sense: that we know what we are doing but we know little of why we are doing it, nor what our doing does. And in an age when structuralism has been all but eliminated we tend to find ourselves even more deeply embedded in schemes that we feel to be so much our own individual schemes and choices and even strategies, but that are in fact even more embedded in social determinism than in the golden age of the deconstruction of the subject. If we have free will but the will is not free, then we are likely to miss the way in which our own lives are bound up in larger structures and logics that we claim to be the products of our own intentionality. This is the true cunning of Reason and the very reason for the necessity of a structural anthropology or any anthropology that combines the phenomenology of the emic with the “view from afar.”

A Case Study A recent and extremely well-written book by Ian Buruma (2006) explores the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam and the threats made to Van Gogh’s friend and one-time co-worker, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Buruma does an excellent job of characterizing his own liberal and multicultural position as an intellectual who left the Netherlands as a young man to see a larger world, a positioning that is evident in his characterization of his country of birth as quaint and his own home town as bourgeois and boring – all as opposed to the cosmopolitan space that he adheres to today. It is important to know this since he endeavours at the same time to understand the intentionalities of the actors that he studies in this book. My experiment here consists in using this book, as well as a number of articles from several sources, as a basis for the description of events. I will then suggest that there is a structure to the field of this set of events, one that reveals what can be designated a political culture in transformation. I shall not follow Buruma’s presentation since I am not doing a text analysis, but shall use his material to arrive at a structure that accounts for the events he describes without doing violence to his story.1



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The Murder of Pim Fortuyn Pim Fortuyn was the son of a travelling salesman whom he despised, of a Catholic family in a Protestant town, a homosexual in a heterosexual world, a self-identified outsider in all ways, as he wrote in his autobiography. He became an academic, and was known as a Marxist sociologist. He specialized in being what might be called politically incorrect, and the latter is, of course, a litmus test of the structures of sociality and accepted social order in any society. He dressed extravagantly and he had a white Daimler. He was completely open about his homosexuality and, against what anti-racists would have expected of him, openly spoke of his relations with young Moroccan men. He became a very popular “outsider” politician with support from what might be called the “republican” left, the old culturally liberal, iconoclastic left for which the Netherlands was famous in the 1960s and 1970s. He was also popular with portions of the nationalistic right although he himself would never associate himself with the nationalist figures of Le Pen or Haider. He called for a moratorium on immigration in order to first make sure that the immigrants were fully integrated into Dutch society. His party became the most popular in the country just before he was murdered. His assassin was a vegan, who hated Fortuyn because he flaunted his furs and his luxurious style of consumption. The assassin came from a strongly Protestant and puritan background, and his “green” ideology contained a significant anti-Western component that was counter to the artificial consumer lifestyle that was typical of European societies and which, of course, also exploited nature. So Fortuyn’s assassin was on the side of nature against the excesses of capitalist culture. But he also stated that he wanted to eliminate Fortuyn in order to protect the immigrant population from Fortuyn’s political strategy. Background in Brief The Netherlands was and still is a very wealthy country in which the welfare state of a social democratic variety had been dominant and which had sported a highly liberal attitude to all traditional values, critical of its own puritanism and both generous and open to other cultures and peoples. The glorious period of the 1960s and 1970s was similar in much of Europe, with increasing levels of consumption and higher living standards, in which state transfers successfully

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dampened class differences but also in which class politics was important in the definition of a future utopia of equality and freedom. This situation changed radically with the economic contraction that began at the end of the 1970s in most of Europe and ended in the emergence of “flexibilization” of both capital accumulation and of labour, the massive export of production and jobs, and the effective downward mobility of large sections of the working class, as well as the simultaneous yuppification of the new financial capitalist sectors. In the 1980s and 1990s class relations became increasingly polarized in objective terms at the same time as they were increasingly ignored as a basis for political action. In the earlier period, ethnicity – cultural difference in general – was relatively unmarked in Western Europe, at least in public discourse. In the following period cultural difference replaced class as the dominant discourse. There is a connection with broader global processes in this transformation. The 1980s saw declining hegemony and increasing disorder in large parts of the formerly Western- and Soviet-dominated world, leading to political and cultural fragmentation, to warfare, and to large-scale migration to Europe. Two important changes characterized this new situation, changes to which we return later in the discussion. First, among elites there was a fusion of left and right into a respectable centrist politics. Second, with the decline of modernism, of the ideal of a better world in the future, the past loomed ever more important. The past was about origins, thus about culture, and this combined with migration that could not, in a stagnating industrial economy, lead to integration. The result was a search for meaningful roots, which led to ethnicization among both nationals and immigrants, and multiculturalism became an increasingly dominant ideology among political and related elites who no longer had class on their agenda. There is a logic in this transformation of part of the left that is important to consider here, one that I have described for Sweden that displays a number of similarities with the Netherlands. The top-down multicultural politics of the new centrist right-left combination links a number of elements. First, new political coalitions transcended – in Tony Blair’s and Anthony Giddens’s (2000) sense – the right-left divide. This is epitomized in the Third Way of New Labour but also of the Neue Mitte in Germany. Social democracy assimilated neo-liberal politics and redefined it as not only progressive, but also necessary.



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The dismantling of the welfare state, on this account, was necessary because of globalization, a force of nature, that implies increasing competition and therefore cuts in spending, but is understood as good and progressive. As Giddens puts it, “‘Radicalism’ cannot any longer be equated with ‘being on the left.’ On the contrary, it often means breaking with established leftist doctrines where they have lost their purchase on the world” (39). Now, of course, “radical” can be right as well as left, and its defin­ ition has never been that clear, but it has usually meant extreme, a movement away from accepted centrist doctrine. Giddens has, however, defined radical with a movement from social democracy to liberalism, that is, a radical centrism. Furthermore it is connected to the notion of la voie unique, namely, that there is only one way to govern, an approach that has been institutionalized in New Public Management, and which makes nonsense of popular democracy. The people, the demos, are, if anything, dangerous for real democracy (Burns et al. 2000) and can be replaced by a model in which the true actors are corporations, ethnic groups, government agencies, and experts. The concept of “the people” is returned to the notion of classes dangereuses from a previous era, an object of fear and of necessary resocialization. Multiculturalism is logically compatible if not necessary in this process of reconfiguration. The latter transforms “the people” into “the peoples,” and in the highly centralized state formations of Western Europe, it entails horizontal segregation as well as the encompassment of difference so that the state becomes a primus inter pares rather than representative of a single population. It also, in this way, disassociates the emergent political class from its constituency. In the Swedish case this has implied a cosmopolitanization of political identity including denial among members of the political class of national origins. A former minister of immigration replied, during an interview, when asked if he was Swedish, “No!” and gleefully recounted his genealogy, which had origins in Scotland, Germany, and Denmark. This raison généologique and an explicitly anti-national mentality has upstaged the older assumptions of national identity among elites. In a government act from 1998–99 the Swedish government redefines the country as a plural society that no longer has “a common history,” but it is not clear to what extent this has occurred in the Netherlands.

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The general tendency is, in any case, quite evident in both France and in Sweden. In France the upward distantiation of the already existent “political class” has been analyzed in a number of popular books with expressive titles such as La faute aux élites (Juillard 1997) and Le gouvernement invisible: Naissance d’une démocratie sans le peuple (Joffrin 2001) where the new political elite’s multicultural politics has been described as I have done for Sweden. Ruling sections of the left have shifted toward the right and class politics has become cultural politics. Second, the demographic composition of the Western nationstate has changed significantly with the massive increase in immigration, but it is not the demographic change that is crucial. Rather it is the way in which the identity of both immigrants and host populations is practised and the way such practices have been transformed. The fundamental change is not, then, quantitative but qualitative, consisting largely in the process of ethnicization or more generally in the intensification of cultural identification. The latter has led to a process of transnationalization of social, cultural, and economic relations within the migration process but also in the increasing fear, not least among downwardly mobile national populations, of the unknown and the foreign – which leads to increasing xenophobia. There is marginalization both among nationals and immigrants in this period, and this is expressed in the reconfiguration of urban space in which enclavization becomes generalized. Conflict necessarily increases in such situations, and to this we must add another geopolitical/geocultural development. The particular case of the growth of militant and at least oppositional Islam is that which has been most salient. The geopolitics of this situation combines the general enclavization process with a growing geopolitical representation of the world that pits the Islamic world against the Christian (and Jewish) West. The movement for the establishment of Islam in Europe and even, for some ideologues, the Islamization of Europe as reinforced oppositional identifications, has become more or less institutionalized after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the ensuing war on terror.2 In this process of polarization the generalized increase in existential insecurity combines with what is perceived as aggression, which is not a mere fantasy, and takes on the prototypical characteristics of occidentalists versus Islamophobes. To reduce this to one-sided racism is absurd. There have been no attacks on Buddhists, Hindus, or



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Orthodox Christians. But these religions do not form part of a world historical cosmology of such schismogenic scale. This in turn reinforces the process of enclavization that accompanies the usual effects of non-integration: exclusion and poverty, aggression and criminality. Many European countries find themselves in a critical situation with respect to just such a state of affairs. This is very different from the situation in the 1960s and early 1970s when immigrants were sought after, usually integrated, and often assimilated into their host countries. Many previous immigrants from this period are themselves very disturbed by the current situation and are often quite suspicious of the immigration policies that have dominated recent decades.

Pim Fortuyn In the Netherlands the new centrist governments are called “purple” as in red (left) + blue (right) and have divided the old left (old is not the real old left but the old new left from the 1960s and 1970s). Fortuyn was part of that left which became disaffected. He represented the dominant culture of the previous period that had combined a strong sense of popular sovereignty with cultural iconoclasm. This implied that homosexuality in its most flamboyant expression could be perfectly acceptable within the social field of Dutch society since it was part and parcel of Dutch liberation politics. It could not, however, accept the existence of other social projects imported from the outside, especially if they implied an arbitrary restriction on rights that had been won by struggles within Dutch society. In February of 2002, “A reporter asked him [Fortuyn] why he felt so strongly about Islam. ‘I have no desire,’ he replied, ‘to have to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again. There are many gay high school teachers who are afraid of revealing their identity because of Turkish and Moroccan boys in their classes. I find that scandalous” (cited in Buruma 2006: 57). This republican or national or sovereigntist left typifies the emergent ideologies that are the basis of support for figures like Fortuyn. His murder was not, then, a mere expression of the progressive rage at a right-wing racist or even Nazi as some called him. Thus, part of the left became what I call respectable, neo-liberal, and multicultural, while another part became sovereigntist and maintained the old socialist ideals as well as an assimilationist ideology.

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What is most interesting in this is that this position developed primarily in reaction to Islam rather than to immigration in general. The former became a symbol for resistance and even aggression to values considered central to Western democratic culture. And it became increasingly manifest following the attack on the World Trade Center. Fortuyn’s murder was not the work of a foreigner, but of an internal oppositional actor, one who identified with Nature and would go to extremes to protect it from a meat-eating, fur-wearing consumerist who was against the proliferation of Islam via immigration. What are the oppositions that characterize the intentionality of the vegan? In this case it might be an example of what Buruma and Margalit (2004) have called occidentalism, an occidentalism that associates Western values with evil and the decadence of the contemporary world and that opposes those values. Is there a logic to the overt statements by assassin Volkert van der Graaf that Fortuyn had to be killed not only because of his negative relation to Nature but because of his negative attitude to immigration? For van der Graaf, immigrants seem to be associated with Nature as well, as if those parts of the world from which immigrants come are the Other, the holistic, good Other and representatives of an alternative to the West. That Otherness is associated with a holistic relation to nature as well, a primitivism as an inversion of the modernist developmentalism of the West. These may be rather loose connections but they are similar to those that I have found in interviews with members of such groups: they reproduce racialist logic while being anti-racist. Fortuyn became an instant hero in the Netherlands. His funeral was a true spectacle, highlighting his own taste for luxury. His Daimler was in the cortege driven by his chauffeur, with Fortuyn’s two dogs. There was music and there were football songs, both of which expressed national and local football tribalism – and all of this for a flamboyant homosexual dandy. Social Democrat Ad Melkert, who attended the funeral, was accosted by a well-dressed elderly woman who screamed, “Now you’ve got what you want, you bastard” (Buruma 2006: 44). Not just a hero for many, but a virtual saint, a holy figure embodying a sovereign ideal of what was perceived as a world soon to be lost. Fortuyn was voted the most popular man in Dutch history, and a statue was erected in his name in



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Rotterdam with the motto “Loquendi libertatem custodiamus” (Let us safeguard the right to speak). This is the kind of reaction that liberals and those leftists who have appropriated liberal pluralism abhor. Buruma is cynical about the reaction and explicitly characterizes Fortuyn as a paradoxical figure: “Fortuyn was no Haider or Le Pen; he was something more interesting: a populist who played on the fear of Muslims while boasting of having sex with Moroccan boys; a reactionary who denounced Islam for being a danger to Dutch liberties; a social climber who saw himself as an outsider battling the elite … he was a peddler of nostalgia” (Buruma 2006: 47). This echos the interpretation of many self-identified liberal progressives, even though Buruma himself is ambivalent about the situation, and while against Fortuyn’s politics, he understands that there is a real political issue here rather than just plain populist trickery.

Van Gogh Theo Van Gogh, grand-nephew of the great artist, was brought up in the cultural elite, though certainly not rich. He was a member of the dissident left and famous for his provocative and even vulgarly provocative style. Not given to understatement, he appeared often on TV and had a newspaper column in which he attacked a great many things. He was accused of anti-Semitism, and renowned for a whole series of crude invectives against personalities in the Dutch culture scene. Much of this is accounted for by Buruma in terms of personality, but there is also a logic to this. Van Gogh became famous in the Netherlands by means of an invective that was very much aimed at what he saw as the hypocrisy that was prevalent in his own society. His language followed suit, littered with four-letter words and their spectacular elaboration. He immediately became interested in Fortuyn and the two became friends, the latter writing “one-liners” for Van Gogh’s media appearances. As a young man he had made a few extremely foul films but some very interesting works as well. He made a film about the assassination of Fortuyn in which a conspiracy of the US Secret Service, the extreme right, and American intervention play central roles. Van Gogh attacked everything and everyone. He cannot be reduced to a racist, not unless his racism is entirely generalized. He attacked

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all ethnic groups including his own, a true “equal opportunity racist.” He was primarily a champion of what he thought of as honesty, hard talk, and the abhorrence of hypocrisy in whatever form. His attraction to Ayaan Hirsi Ali (see below) stems from the manner in which her own critique of Islam was treated as dangerous and all too provocative by the political elite of the country. This of course led to his film together with her, Submission, which deals with the oppression of women in Islam, but it is also a direct attack on the prophet Mohammed. It is this “blasphemy” that provoked Van Gogh’s murder. But Van Gogh also helped a number of young Muslim actors and employed them in his films. In one televised drama about cross-ethnic love, he is clearly on the side of the Moroccan boy rather than the Dutch policeman who is the father of the girl or the Dutch boyfriend who causes the Moroccan boy to drown. These are cases in which the individuals break the rules represented by their parents, on both sides. As he said, “There are a hundred thousand decent Muslims, to whom we Dutch people ought to reach out” (Buruma 2006: 108). Van Gogh was one of the few Dutch directors to make films about the issues of immigration. He was decidedly politically incorrect on all fronts. This was his modus vivendi, and it was the cause of his death. Of course there were many liberals who accused him of causing his own death, that is, via his provocative style. He was clearly not a person who was afraid of “rocking the boat,” but he was apparently unaware of the price to be paid in the contemporary world of multicultural conflict. Hirsi Ali Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, was brought up as a devout Muslim in East Africa, went to Islamist schools, and was completely engaged in the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, of martyrdom, and of wearing the hijab as a teenager. But at the age of twenty-two, when she was to be married off to a cousin in Canada, she revolted against her fate and escaped to Europe. She admits openly that she lied about her Somali origins and her family, which later caused her serious problems, because she thought it would be easier to gain acceptance in Europe. She is an outspoken critic of Islam, not least with regard to the treatment of women, and she was involved, as stated above, in Van Gogh’s film Submission, for which she wrote the screenplay.



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The film is a frontal attack on the relation between Islam and gender dominance and its inherent violence. It was this film that apparently led to Van Gogh’s eventual death at the hands of Mohammed Bouyeri, a Moroccan Muslim who attacked and killed him as he was cycling to work. Bouyeri stabbed Van Gogh numerous times and planted a knife in his chest with a note of warning to Hirsi Ali. Bouyeri was the son of an immigrant who was a successful hard-working man who became handicapped in his long life of labour. Bouyeri was a bright boy, open-minded, and interested in becoming part of Dutch society, but a number of setbacks ruined his career in this respect. First, his club lost its meeting place due to urban renewal. He was involved in a brawl with police and subsequently turned down for a job at the airport. Finally, he was unsuccessful in his relationship with women, especially Dutch women, all of which incited increasing aggression. It has been noted by many that the makings of violent aggression to Western society are often the result of failure in projects of self-integration. This is probably as true for Westerners as for immigrants, but in the latter case the aggression can take on a cultural form that is clearly marked, as in the case of Islamism, a solution that is also open to Westerners as can be seen among the several terrorists of Western extraction.

The Cultural Logic of Two Assassinations There is a logical similarity in these two murders, one that can be understood in terms of the following scheme of opposed terms: West/non-West Decadence/Vitality Secular/Religious Lax(-authority)/Controlled(+authority) Civilization/Nature Now these terms can be found in both the statements of Bouyeri and of those who supported him in principle even if disagreeing with him in practice, as well as of van der Graaf, although here information from other vegans needs to be used to account for the categories he employed. In both cases there is a prominent occidentalist positioning. The West is seen to represent everything

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negative: decadence, secularism, laxity – all of which is associated with civilization as opposed to the natural holistic worlds of the Other. What is sometimes referred to as primitivism is an inversion of the signs of a former relation of dominance. In the modernist period the West was associated with vitality and control as well as with individual(ist) liberation. The dandy, sexuality, and female and homosexual liberation are part of this, all terms that refer to the individual subject as against the collectivity. Modernist liberation became the rallying point for the support of both Fortuyn and Van Gogh in a state dominated by an elite that had gone liberal-multiculturalist. Why should this pose a problem? After all liberalism and multiculturalism are excellent partners. But, of course, liberation is not liberalism. On the contrary, the radical left is quite opposed to liberalism as such. The split in the left occurred, as we have indicated, because a significant part of the left moved toward the liberal centre. I offer here a speculation on the changes involved in political culture that this situation helps to clarify.

Occidentalism and Ideological Inversion Since the end of the 1970s there has been an inversion of signs on a set of oppositions that can be said defines Western identity in most Western countries. The former dominant ideology or identity was one in which the West was the centre and the non-West the lowerranked periphery, in which the West had surpassed superstition and arrived at a scientifically dominated secular society, in which the truth was about the scientific search for truth in true modernist fashion. This has come to be reversed in a double sense. First, the economic and now the cultural hegemony of the West is in decline and challenged from new rising or contesting regions. The contestation is also part of the ideological inversion of modernism within the West itself. Some of this has been discussed in Friedman (2002, 2010) and in the recent Buruma and Margalit volume, Occidentalism (2004). It refers to the transformation of the representation of the progressive, one that Van Gogh and Fortuyn did their best to dismantle. Buruma (2006: 30) is acutely aware of the kind of ideological inversion for which we have argued:



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Table 8.1 The shifting content of progressive ideology 1968

1998

The national The local Collective Social(ist) Political intervention Homogeneous Monocultural Equality (sameness)

The postnational The global Individual Liberal Moral intervention Heterogeneous Multicultural Hierarchy (difference)

There is a long and frequently poisonous history in European politics of left-wing internationalism and conservative defence of traditional values. The Left was on the side of universalism, scientific socialism, and the like, while the Right believed in culture, in the sense of “our culture,” “our traditions.” During the multicultural age of the 1970s and 1980s, this debate began to shift. It was now the Left that stood for culture and tradition, especially “their” culture and tradition, that is, those of the immigrants, while the Right argued for the universal values of the Enlightenment. The problem in this debate was the fuzzy border between what was in fact universal and what was merely “ours.” The shift described in Table 8.1 is an expression of the ideological inversion of the representation of “the progressive” in the West, which is also encompassed in what one might call the shift from orientalism to occidentalism, a shift from a self-assured imperial centre to a weakened cultural authority, the target of both internal and external onslaughts. All of this is the true expression of a real hegemonic decline. This comparison of two different decades indicates the sudden shift in identification that is reflected in the case study provided by Buruma. It occurs within a single generation, although from interviews there are many younger people who identify with the progressive terms for 1998 listed in Figure 8.1 who are quite unaware of the previous ideology. For those who have undergone the shift themselves repression is a common solution, or even denial, but rarely

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Figure 8.1.  External meets internal occidentalism.

a more serious consideration of what has happened. An analysis of this set of oppositions throws further light on the Dutch situation. The 1960s and early 1970s were an era of “national liberation” applied to the Third World, to decolonization, and to the rights of Indigenous peoples, all fused in a millenarian project of liberation and local or national sovereignty. The post-national did not of course exist in this period. But there was instead internationalism, which meant primarily class alliance and for some, for example, Trotskyists, the formation of a world socialist order. There were debates, going back to the turn of the last century, regarding the socialist project, but the terms were indeed different and they were in any case based on a notion of people as the class, whether national or international. The core of the notion of national liberation concerned the issue of sovereignty, the control by a population of its conditions of existence. The post-national position is instead entirely negative to the national, heaping invective on the latter as the source of xenophobia, essentialism, racism, Nazism, and the like, and characterized in general by the metaphor of closure. The idea of the local follows from the same concept of sovereignty, but applied to the selfidentified community, whether a tribe or a political commune. It is rejected today in favour of the global which is no longer associated with encroachment and the world capitalist economy, but with openness and, therefore, progress. The collective is a mere summation of a set of terms also related to sovereignty, in which a common social project is the basic value. The shared quality of the goal creates the movement for change or revolution and the latter are



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understood as collective ventures. This is replaced by the centrality of the individual and a rejection of the collective as dangerous. This rejection is partly fuelled by the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet empire and the transition to individualist liberalism in the left – which gave the collective a bad name. This transition is characterized by the breakdown of working-class organization and by the increasing focus on individual fulfilment via consumption, whether of commodities, tradition, or religion. This is reflected in the shift from social to liberal and from political to moral representations of the world. It is also a shift from the creation of a new world to the struggle for particular human rights and humanist interventions. In the 1960s the homogeneous was simply a product of the ideology of sovereignty, of a common project. This was not an issue of the cloning of subjects but of shared goals. It is today conflated with essentialism and the homogeneous nation – which should and shall be replaced by diversity and heterogeneity. The monocultural follows from this, of course, but here refers only to political culture, since other forms of cultural specificity were unmarked (in terms of identity) in the 1960s. The politicization of culture in a situation of fragmentation and ethnicization generated the opposed term multiculturalism. Egalitarianism is also replaced in the wake of heterogenization, which is applied in cultural terms in a transition that moves from equality as sameness to equality as difference, and the latter can imply and certainly allows for hierarchy. In any case the erasure of class differentiation from the new emphasis on culture largely eliminated any concern with such matters. This shifting perspective on the world provides some content to the structural transformation that I am trying to grasp. It is one that contains another series that is explicitly discussed by Buruma and Margalit (2004), one in which the West is seen as the prototype of all the terms on the left-hand side of the set of oppositions shown in Table 8.1).

The Resurgence of the Other If orientalism, as we suggest above, can be understood as the ideo­ logical framework of Western domination, the decline of Western hegemony can be translated into a resurgence of Otherness. This is reflected in the emergence of Indigenous movements and the general ethnicization referred to above. The threat to the disaffected

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republican left is not the threat of other cultures themselves, but the threat of one’s own culture being contested by real Others as well as by the new liberal elites that have emerged from the former ranks of the progressive, the new cosmopolitans who are among the chief perpetrators of occidentalist perspectives. In the West itself this is the core of post-colonial discourse, of the critique of orientalism. Now Van Gogh was a vicious critic of his own society, but his criticism was not foundational and it was not cultural. On the contrary his critique, like that of the left of the 1960s, was directed toward the hypocrisy of politicians, to smug bourgeois notions of political correctness, and of a particular status quo. This was critique from the inside, based on the values and ideals of the same culture that was used to target the failure of those values in actual practice. The new occidentalist critique, however, was total, summed up in the famous Stanford University chant, “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Western culture’s got to go!” Occidentalism refers to the latter phenomenon, of course, but it is also one that is represented in the Islamicist onslaught and that is crucial in understanding why it is just here that the conflict has been strongest. It is strangely essentialist when we consider that it comes from a post-colonial discourse that sees essentialism as the major problem of Western orientalism, but that nevertheless engages itself in the essentialization of the West. The two murders discussed here are, in this sense, examples of internal and external occidentalism, the first, the vegan-ecological rage against modern capitalist society, and the second, the rage against secular modernism and the West as its chief imperial representative.This accounts for the overlap in the positions of Bouyeri and Van der Graaf. The overlap lies in the occidentalist identification with the Other. That “Other” could be the primitive/traditional counterpart to civilization as it appeared within orientalist discourse but with the signs reversed. The two sets are, of course, inconsistent, but for the occidentalist there are always ways to explain apparent inconsistencies in positive terms. Thus, strength, authority, and religion as categories are reconfigured as part of a holistic vision that contains that which is sorely lacking in the West. Decadence enters as the expression of consumerist desire without self-control and without consideration for the environment. As the West is defined as a negative term, only the West can be dominant and imperialist. And the core of the problem is the nation-state itself, the generator of essentialist



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evil. Thus, a great effort is made to depict the Ottoman Empire (Mills 2008, 2010; Mayaram 2008, Borovali 1998) as progressive in its millet system of multiculturalism by insisting on the intrinsically non-Western character of such a social arrangement. Multiculturalism belongs to the Other in this inversion of signs. The above pattern depicts a broad transformational process, transformational in the structuralist sense because it involves the reversal of signs among relations whose underlying properties are invariant. The equation at the end contains the statements made by the two murderers, one an internal occidentalist and the other an external occidentalist. The coincidence of these oppositional positions is the conjunctural expression of declining global hegemony. This is not, of course, the entire story but it does reveal a set of parameters that are also evident in the following cases. The Van Gogh/Fortuyn story is the story of the disaffected left in the most concrete sense. But it is a specific left, characterized by what can be called sovereigntism, the will to power over one’s collective conditions of existence. This is the sovereignty associated with the French Revolution, that which makes it a nationalist (in the most generic sense) movement, one that makes “all power to the people” the core of the ideology of direct democracy in which governance is the extension of the will of the people, where there is no mediating term such as a representative corps of legislators, or at least where the latter are mere extensions of popular sovereignty, meaning here majority sovereignty. All oppositions harbour ambivalence and the above are no exceptions. One might criticize Fortuyn for being a nationalist at the same time as he sported a cosmopolitan elite lifestyle, but oppositions are always relative, and in this case the national for Fortuyn was about his own perspective on the West – which he associated with the liberal gains that made his own homosexual existence more bearable. His opposition to Islam was about his own liberty and a world that enabled him to gain the latter. Both Fortuyn and Van Gogh represent a radical modernist position that entails continuous critique in a way that is prototypical for Western modernism. In this sense there is no break with the modern but rather its intensification. This can be said to be shared by classical revolutionary movements and their avant-gardes, all part of a specific and waning tradition of history making.

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The configuration is not specific to the Netherlands although it expresses a specific historical conjuncture. The republican left is an established voice in France as well as in the Netherlands, but it hardly exists in England or in Scandinavia as a collective phenomenon. There is a small but growing political party in Sweden, the Swedish Democrats, that might be said to represent the same kind of political position, just as the much larger Danish People’s Party. For the former, many of the members are former socialists and even communists, as in the case of the Front National in France. Individual voices certainly exist in all countries of Europe, but it is especially in the Netherlands and France that they exist as collective expressions. In terms of shifting politics one might describe a more general logic or invariant, which can be manifested in a number of different forms or combinations depending on specific cultural/historical conditions. It should be noted, however, that what is invariant here is an invariant logic of change rather than a static form. The classical left (socialist and social democratic) and right have tended to merge in terms of practical politics. This merger is expressed in a series of terms using the adjective “new”: new democrats, new labour, even new conservatives (who are moderates in Sweden), and especially neue Mitte in Germany where its spatial character captures the reordering of the political arena. The doctrine involved in this is contained in the various documents and publications concerning the Third Way, also expressive of a new centralism. The new centralization of politics is cemented by New Public Management (NPM) ideology in which a single praxeology of governance is meant to replace the “ideological” principles of the past and it is enunciated from both left and right: la voie unique from the socialists in France to den enda vägen from the Swedish right. Politics is reduced to management in this way, just as class issues are stricken from the political agenda as a basis of organization. The above process becomes intimately articulated with the shift from class to culture that began somewhat earlier in the 1980s. The decline of modernism, the decline of Fordism, the emergence of flexible accumulation, flexible labour, and the economic crisis of the state and its consequent outsourcing spelled the end of an era of the centralized state social project dominated by modernist assimilation as well as welfare, which on the left was the socialist or at least social democratic project itself and on the right the liberal



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modernist project in which homogeneity was crucial for the notion that the state was an instrument of “the people.” The decline of the modernist project, very much related to the declining hegemony of the West, led to a series of re-identifications based on the only thing that could be said to be fixed in a chaotic world, cultural identity. The latter, of course, is not fixed in objective terms, but it is experienced as fixed. Cultural identity of this sort, chosen or reborn in a period of crisis can be described as achieved ascription. Thus, roots, ethnicity, religion, and gender all increase in political importance. As this is accompanied by real disorder and increasing displacement of populations, it also imprints itself on the migration wave of the 1980s. It is not, of course, migration that leads to the growing issue of immigrant culture and identity. Rather it is the increasing focus on identity itself in this period of declining modernism. The previous period in Europe was characterized by large-scale labour migration as well, but in that period of economic expansion ethnicity was not a major issue since it was still dominated by modernist ideology. In those “old days,” class solidarity played a more important role than ethnicity (Touraine 1978, 1979; Wieviorka 1996; Wieviorka and Ohana 2001). The involvement of the political establishment in all of this is crucial for understanding the way in which the contemporary situation came to be structured. The decline of modernism had a major effect on the political elites. The loss of political ideology on the left and the economic transformation in the West that undermined class politics linked these elites to the general process of increasing cultural and identity politics which became their own agenda in this period. As immigration became a cultural issue that wouldn’t go away, multiculturalism became a possible program. And as governance became increasingly distanced from popular opinion, the politics of culture became a new source of state activity. Top-down multiculturalism became a new agenda for both liberals and the left – which was already becoming liberal – as submitted by Juillard (1997: 105): Aux ouvriers elles ont substitué les immigrés et ont reporté sur ceux-ci le double sentiment de crainte et de compassion qu’inspire généralement le prolétaire. Or l’immigré n’est pas seulement victime de l’exclusion sociale, mais aussi de l’exclusion ethnique, autrement dit du racisme.

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(They have substituted immigrants for the working class and have invested the former with the double emotion of fear and compassion that formerly inspired the relation to the proletariat. However, the immigrant is not only a victim of social exclusion but also of ethnic exclusion, in other words, racism.) The substitution of immigrant for worker spelled a shift from the “sociological” left to the “moral” left. This is not a mere question of changing strategies but an important structural transformation, or even an articulation of transformations. Suddenly politics was about racism rather than class inequality. And the discourse on multiculturalism that dominated the transition was the celebration of difference as a factor of social enrichment. The identification of political elites as cosmopolitan is also part of this process since it provided the perspective needed to look down on the world, so to speak, and marvel in the jumble of exotica to be found in the global concentration of differences. In some cases, as that of Sweden, the ideology became an issue of the necessity of importing difference, which turned out to be ideologically and economically advantageous as well as a source of cultural enrichment, as described by Westin (2000: 734): “Diversity is linked with immigration. If immigration is stopped, diversity is jeopardized. Policy-makers should reassess immigration policy. Diversity should not be seen as a means to handle what is perceived as ‘problematic immigration.’ Rather, immigration needs to be seen as the positive means to achieve the goal of diversity. All Western countries have ageing populations. If welfare systems are to be maintained immigration of labor power will soon become an economic demographic necessity.”3 The parallels between such statements and the crasser statement to be found in the colonial pluralism of the past are quite striking. Moreover, as in the colonial era, diversity was a critical ingredient in governance in which the relation between rulers and ruled was not bound to political representation. That is, in colonial regimes there are no citizens, only subjects. As rulers are lifted into a higher sphere of governance they escape the demands of accountability of those governed. The diversification of the population accelerates the transformation of “the people” into peoples, the state becoming increasingly absolute in its functioning. In this process the national population can be reduced to just another ethnic group.



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The contemporary issues of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism are all generated as political concerns from this complex of changes. To characterize this development, we might say that it consists in a movement from the nation-state to a plural society. If this were combined with the movement toward a new, less democratic, centralized state, then the future Western polity might return to some form of absolutism, or even to an internal colonialism, which is one possible outcome of absolute rule. Absolutist states were, we note, supremely pluralist, not least insofar as they had no “people” to deal with, only “peoples” – who were subjects rather than citizens (Friedman 2010). The classical left has split along the issues of the common project and its relation to shared values into a liberal (and even neoliberal) dominant wing and a traditional sovereigntist/republican wing. The latter is classified as backward-looking and even reactionary by the former. This is a general split in all of its variations. In Europe it is a split between dominant social democratic elites and what is often the marginalized left within the party or even outside of the party. Republican tendencies in France have connected former left and right elements under the banner of the republic and the nation. In France these are powerful tendencies that cannot be easily dismissed. In Sweden such tendencies are seen by the dominant liberal elites as reactionary, racist, and anti-democratic. Traces of the same split can be found in the intellectual left in the United States, where former leftists such as Todd Gitlin (1995) and Eric Jacoby (1994) were often recategorized as reactionary on the grounds that they represent a republican/national ideal.4 In politics the shift to the centre is expressed in the entry of large numbers of former leftists into the ranks of the Democratic Party and the growth of multicultural politics not least in the university world, which became the locus of a new discourse of post-colonial hybridity, while on the street ethnic politics reigned supreme. The labile variable here is the degree to which the ruling new liberal elites have been able to contain the republican renegades by redefining the political arena. This ability depends on the specific political culture of the country. In Sweden, for example, the shift to multicultural from class politics has occurred without a republican split because tendencies in that direction have been successfully contained by labelling them as racist, fascist, and even Nazi in

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conditions of ideological hegemony. Thus, the republican left has been labelled as right and race has become the definitive factor in differentiating left and right. Such hegemony has not been possible in most other countries. The Netherlands is an example of the more usual situation of contestation in which the state is liberal and multicultural. France is another example of this situation of contestation in which the state is republican. The United Kingdom has some similarities to Sweden, but the state has recently backed down on multiculturalism after several decades of pluralist politics. On the other hand, the structure of the political space of the United Kingdom is quite special with an imperial level in which there are subjects of the crown and a national level that is characterized by national citizenship. It might be suggested that it is the imperial imaginary that makes the recourse to cultural pluralism an attractive possibility in the United Kingdom. In this process the elites have seen themselves becoming increasingly estranged from their national constituencies, as welfare has been outsourced and downsized at the same time as their own privileges have significantly increased. They tend to look upward and outward and identify increasingly beyond the nation-state and into the cosmo-sphere, the arena of a global elite community. This latter encompasses liberalism and sometimes neo-liberalism, occidentalism, multiculturalism, and some form of hybridity, understood as the fusion of difference, as in fusion cooking which also appears in this period. In a number of countries this process is accompanied by a shift of lower-class voters from the left to what are called right-wing nationalist parties. This is the phenomenon of “lemon nationalism,” among the downwardly mobile members of the working class. The support for such parties on the part of this segment of the national population is well documented and it is related to the decline of the industrial sector in the West and the resultant downward mobility of the increasingly under- or unemployed members of this sector.

Structure and the Logic of Transformation If we consider these processes, we can suggest a trajectory that might account for the transitions involved. The splitting of the left occurs in most European countries, but it is most strongly manifested in



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the Netherlands and France, whereas in other countries it has been suppressed by the new liberal-left actors themselves. These differences are, as we have said, variations on common themes rather than totally separate and unrelated cases. They are united by a combination of invariant tendencies in the vertical space of the nation-state and historical particularities in the states themselves. The general process is one in which the left splits into two, the liberal sector moving toward the liberal right in a consolidation of a new centrism while the other part of the left (old left?) moves increasingly toward a localist/sovereigntist position that merges in some respects with the new right nationalism. The left-right centralist fusion generates a process of political marginalization of those sectors of both right and left that refuse the move toward the centre. Furthermore, the centre is also cosmopolitan and even post-national, and it very often harbours a strong anti-nationalist self-identity. These new quasi-coalitions create a new division, but this is unlike the former left/right division because it is decidedly hierarchical. As class politics declines, moral politics rises to dominance. Political discourses are about the good, about good governance, transparency, human rights, openness, tolerance, and even about an embrace (at a distance to be sure) of the Other who is now among us as a product of mass immigration. It is also about culture and respect for culture, not all culture but the culture of others defined as the victims of colonialism. This representation is shared by immigrant actors as well as their cosmopolitan allies. The degree to which it is formulated by the former depends on the articulateness of the population in question, a variable that is linked to education and social class. The French movement, Les indigènes de la république (http://www.indigenes-republique.fr/) is an example of the inversion of signs discussed here. The participants in the movement represent themselves as colonial subjects within the heart of the French state, and they demand the inversion of values that would enable them to achieve their freedom from dominance. In Sweden a similar interpretation has developed, but here it is in a group of researchers hired by the state to investigate discrimination (Kamali 2006). They argue that Sweden is structurally racist because of the dominance of Swedish culture, a particular mode of interpreting the world, of acting and teaching, which excludes the foreigner, one that is implicit in all spheres of life, from school to government. The solution to this problem is the elimination of the hegemony

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of Swedish culture in Sweden. The difference between the French and Swedish situations is that while in France “les indigènes” are an outsider group, in Sweden they are representatives of the state. The authors of the report (above)were seen to be so lacking intellectually that they actually caused quite a bit of critical discussion without changing the framework of interpretation from which the report arose. These differences are differences in particular configurations and not in kind. Beneath it all is a basic set of relations that remain constant. The mechanisms of the transformation can be likened to the kind of process discussed by Lévi-Strauss in his “Do Dual Organizations Exist” (1958) in which he delineates the relations between what he calls diametric and concentric dualism and for which he constructed some elaborate models. I suggest here that this is applicable to the reconfiguration of political culture in contemporary Western European nation-states. The political core of concentric dualism is the diarchy discussed by Marshall Sahlins in numerous works since his essay on the “stranger-king” (1985a: 73–93). The language of the cosmopolitanism to which we have referred is clearly akin to Sahlins’s model of foreign rule internalized. It is not exactly the xenophobia of Sparta versus the cosmopolitanism of Athens, although there are interesting zones of overlap. Consider the cosmopolitan Athens with its population of 80 per cent slaves and 20 per cent free and democratic citizens, and the various categories of foreigners, who were categorized as external to Athenian society. Slavery was, of course, directly linked to the Athenian international trade system. Sparta, more self-isolated, had a system of socialist helotry instead based on a striving after self-sufficiency. Is this not similar to the internal divisions of European societies today? In structural terms we might argue for a three-part division: upper classes and certain elites that identify upwards and outwards, working classes in decline that identify inwards, and immigrant lower classes who also identify outward but in a diasporic rather than cosmopolitan way. The latter populations have always existed but have historically been “unmarked,” integrated in a more forceful way into the social order as dependent labour. Of course, in the absence of a nationstate there is no clear “internal” or local population. But even here, as Jean-François Dubost and Peter Sahlins (1999) have shown, there are strong ethnic-territorial identities. So the



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logical order of states might be argued to include the foreign as a hierarchical position of worldly dominance over the local as a structure of the longue durée, a structure that has informed the contemporary cosmopolitan transformation of contemporary political elites. If diametric dualism is based on absolute reciprocity between two moieties that are equal to one another even if there is a certain division of symbolic function among them, concentric dualism is implicitly hierarchical, one side being the inside and the other the outside. The relation between the two is analyzed as a structural transformation that can go in either direction. Lévi-Strauss’s argument is that diametric dualism is not autonomous but a particular expression of concentric dualism – which is the foundational structure. The fact that complementarity implies the possibility of differentiation is the basis of much of his argument, and he provides empirical examples where apparent diametrical dualism contains third terms that imply the possibility of a concentric relation. This is also the ambivalence of the stranger-king or chief who is “domesticated” by the indigenous chief-priest in a ritual in which the former is “sacrificed” and brought back to life, a clearly widespread phenomenon that is well documented for Central Africa by Ekholm-Friedman (1977, 1984). The left/right opposition that has characterized Western European nation-states since the nineteenth century was based on classrelated politics, red versus blue. There are third terms in this pattern that have taken the form of social liberalism, and democratic welfare statism, but the left/right opposition is labile and can be reinvoked at any point in time to rearrange the terms. Thus, social democracy, once a compromise between socialism and the capitalist system, moved from centre to left in more recent decades and is today conflated with official socialism. Welfare state politics can be characterized as liberal, as in the United States, or socialist as in Europe, but then in the recent rise of neo-conservatism, the liberal has often been shifted into the category of socialist (as on Fox News and in the political rhetoric of the US Republican Party). In all of this there is another dimension, that of class, of elite status, and of the respectability of elite status. This hierarchy is repressed in the left/right division since it exists equally on both sides of the divide, and the divide is about the kind of social order to be constructed in the future. Several leaders of Communist parties in Western Europe have been millionaires but this has not been remarked upon in political representations (see Figures 8.2 and 8.3).

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Figure 8.2.  Components of the concentric shift in political culture.

Figure 8.3.  Diametric to concentric dualism.

The transition from the diametrical to the concentric is a complex process in which a number of factors are involved. First, there is the general decline of modernist class politics and the decline of major social projects. This has left the socialist camp without a vision or a project. With the fading of the latter, other identities have gained in prominence and the latter are necessarily of a cultural (in emic terms) character: ethnicity, roots, gender, and territory being among the most salient. This process included an upward mobility on the part of the left best characterized as adherents of the Third Way. The latter became the new centrally positioned elite along with the liberals from several right parties that have made the same (if shorter) transition. Those “left behind,” characterized by the new elites as reactionary, nationalist, and/or racist are from both the left and



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the right and adherents of a position that can best be characterized as sovereigntist. The above graphics highlight certain aspects of the transformation of the right/left division which was formerly more homogeneous at least in terms of representation. In the 1980s and 1990s there was a shift of the left toward the centre just as the liberal right also came to occupy an increasingly centrist position. This shift is a powerful one that is still ongoing today. In France the liberal François Bayrou formed a new party called “le mouvement démocrate” (http://www.mouvementdemocrate.fr/bayrou.html) that aims at a middle of the road liberal position and that has attracted members of both the socialist and liberal blocks. In Italy the Christian Democrats and parts of the left have also fused in a new Democratic coalition. Prodi’s Partito Democratico is a combination of left Christian Democrats and former Communists who today constitute the Democratici di sinistra (http://www.dsonline.it/). Some of the combinations are strange indeed, but they represent an interesting and important tendency toward a centralism. Moreover, the central position is identified as fundamentally practical, la voie unique that can come from either left or right. The new centre represents itself as respectable and responsible and, by definition, the embodiment of democracy. This becomes the new inner circle, whereas the outer circle represents the irresponsible and therefore undemocratic leftovers of a previous era of left/right opposition based on class and universalist social projects. Thus, the new centre is identified with progress, whereas the outer circle represents reaction. In numerous accounts of current conflicts this frame of categorization operates more or less as taken for granted, as doxa. The analysis provided here contrasts with that usually provided by contemporary progressives. Pieterse (2007), in a recent work on global multiculturalism, discusses the conflicts in Denmark, the Netherlands (his home country), and France. In each case he refers to the economic situation; the economic decline of the welfare state, downward mobility, and mass immigration. Here we agree totally, but where he differs is in viewing the rise of the extreme right as a product of populist manipulation by the new extremist political faction. Furthermore, in his analysis “right” means racist and “left” means multicultural, which is, in both historical and contemporary terms, not merely incorrect but totally misleading. My own point

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of departure is the declining hegemony that leads to the economic conditions highlighted, but unaccounted for, by Pieterse. If we merely penetrate beneath the surface of the language we find, as I have argued, that the left is just as much implicated in this change as is the right. The populism, once a word used to describe a certain anti-capitalist and anti-statist left (farmers and workers together), has changed its meaning, and that in itself is significant enough to warrant a deeper analysis than is forthcoming here. It is, in fact, the colonial regimes of Europe and then the liberal right who were the champions of multiculturalism, while the left for most of the past century was strategically monocultural. The left only became multicultural when it shifted to a more liberal and centrist position, and, as I argue, this accounts only for a portion of the left, not least certain elites, the upwardly mobile sector of the left. As we have suggested, the multicultural is a product of the distancing from local or national populations experienced by the new elites; it should not be surprising that multiculturalism is racialized in this perspective. Thus, Pieterse’s account of multiculturalism is entirely demographic and technological, in that it assumes that the movement of people is identical to the movement of culture, so that the co-mingling of people of different origins is also a co-mingling of cultures, enabled and reinforced by the Internet and easy travel to maintain relations to places of origins. It is interesting that such an essentialized view of culture can be maintained in this globalizing and selfidentified anti-essentialist approach. People do not bear cultures within themselves and, then, as in the old days of industrial migration, are forced to give them up. The maintenance or not of cultural repertoires depends on the social practices involved and the changing contexts in which they are located. That is why a large number of people, even today, assimilate or are at least integrated into their host cultures, depending often on class and other economic factors, but still as an intentional process. Demography cannot in itself be an accurate indicator of identity. The position adopted by Pieterse is, however, that, in varying degrees, of the dominant political and cultural elites. That such elites are progressive, in Giddens’s sense, is a translation of the fact that they have adapted to what they themselves call globalization, a globalization that requires downsizing, outsourcing, and networking, not progress in this approach but a symptom of decline itself.



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The entire issue of migration is inverted into a natural effect of globalization itself in the sense (Appadurai 1996, 2006: Hardt and Negri 2000) that we are all on the move nowadays, perhaps because it has been technologically facilitated, and all of this is part of a universal progress from sedentarism to nomadism. This is an integral aspect of an evolutionist vision, one that suppresses the enormous contradictions in the world system that have led to declining possibilities of survival in large parts of the Third World. Pieterse’s argument reduces to a combination of Jihad-and-McWorld and negative economic trends, and the Jihad in this case is represented by the nationalist right: no matter what the reason, economic or other, there are bad guys and good guys, and the bad guys are the localists, sovereignists, nationalists, etc., while the good guys are the multiculturalists and by extension those who are on the move, no matter why and what their motivation. Another set of oppositions characterize this shift which is very much part of those we have discussed above: Politics Morality

Class Race/Culture

Anti-state Pro-state

Organic intellectuals State intellectuals

These oppositions are characteristic of the situation in Europe as is much of the argument of this essay. It would be hopeless at this point to try and include the situation in countries such as the United States, but there are interesting parallels even if they represent different variations on the themes. We might suggest that if we look at the Republican and Democratic parties over the past decades there is also an interesting double set of oppositions beneath the official left/right opposition. Just as in Europe, we might find a transversal categorization that includes liberal republicans, who represent the Eastern establishment and their counterparts in the Democratic Party, from the eras of Roosevelt, Harriman, and later the Kennedys. The latter can be identified with the transatlantic alliance of financial capital that was the core of global organizations, from the Bilderberg to the World Economic Forum and the Trilateral Commission. This is clearly expressed in the close relation between both the Democratic (and Republican) Party and the dominant investment banks that were so involved in the crash of 2008 and in the way members of such banks were involved in the government bailout of the financial sector.

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Here there are the powerful capitalist elites whose interest is in maintaining a system by making compromises, even social democratic compromises where necessary. Opposed to this are a variety of oppositions. First, strange as it might seem, is the recent Republican Christian right (Buchanan 1999), but also large parts of the Democratic South and similar tendencies throughout the country that represent an older populist and working-class political culture, including, as we have suggested, both what are called left and right tendencies. What is specific to the United States is the partial victory of the latter, but similar tendencies can be found in Italy and France and to a lesser degree Germany. If we accept that there are similarities in the political tendencies, even if combined in different configurations, then the recent Republican victories can be understood as a specific conjuncture within the Western sector of the larger global order. It is not our purpose to provide an analysis of these tendencies, but I would suggest that they are part of the same fundamental scheme. It is noteworthy that the Occupy Wall Street Movement and its parallels in Europe has a mixture of Leninist, anarchist, and “extreme” right memberships, including the Tea Party in the United States. And they are opposed to the fusion of centre-left and right in what commentators have referred to as “purple” governance just as in the Netherlands, discussed earlier. This is also evident in the contemporary electoral process. There is a strong political continuity between the Clinton and the Bush administrations. The major difference is the historical shift from financial bubble to real decline. If the Democratic Party sees itself as a party of peace and of redistribution in the current elections, it should not be forgotten that they have very recently stood for the dismantling of whatever welfare institutions did exist, and for their more than fair share of imperial warfare around the world. Intellectuals in all of this are located very much inside of the institutional political order. The former left, which was extra-parliamentarian, is today incorporated into standard party politics. In Europe the decline of radical politics has led to the regrouping of intellectuals into the parties, not least of left intellectuals into standard social democratic institutions. Moreover, as intellectuals produce much of the discourse surrounding these changes, it should not seem unusual that their representations and texts occupy an important place in the contemporary political imaginary.



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Conclusion This discussion has been an experiment in the application of structuralist analysis to contemporary political culture, understood as a set of ordered representations. Lévi-Strauss himself suggested that the analysis of myths could be applicable to the study of political culture in the contemporary world, arguing: “The ‘thought-of’ orders are those of myth and religion. The question may be raised whether, in our own society, political ideology does not belong to the same category” (1958: 300). A major thrust of the work of Marshall Sahlins has been the exploration of the cultural properties of the political which Lévi-Strauss never himself achieved. We have tried to follow this suggestion and feel that it does reveal a great deal concerning the nature of the political process in the modern Western state and in the nature of the constitution of the state order. It also reveals that no understanding of the transformation of the state can be made without placing it within the larger field of ideology understood as the imagined nature of the world in the broadest sense. It questions the absolute dichotomy between left and right and attempts to account for the disappearance of both into the respectable centralist position of practical rule. This movement of diametric to concentric dualism is the central theme of this essay, and it might be suggested that cosmological shifts of this type are not uncommon in history. Our analysis is also meant to be able to account for the violent events in the Netherlands accompanying the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh that have led to yet further confrontations. The formation of a political pale of critics of the status quo who are declassified (déclassé) (Bourdieu 1978) or even demoted as a dangerous class is part of this kind of development. They themselves constitute the outer circle of non- respectful and not respectable troublemakers who were once included within the political spectrum as traditional socialists. These transformations, which have occurred with great rapidity, are evidence for the combinatorial nature of political ideological change in which there are invariant representational structures as well as numerous variants, the latter the product of particular historical conjunctures that are themselves generated by global systemic processes. The political world is a world saturated by strategic choices, but the choices would, if the current

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approach works, be strongly channelled into larger transformative processes that leave less room for alternatives than might appear. The cunning of History is precisely the outcome of a world in which we may know exactly what we are doing, but know little of what we are doing actually does. The only way to arrive at a clearer understanding is to engage in the kind of theoretical activity that Marshall Sahlins has made his hallmark, amplifying in uncharted ways the insights that are structuralist in nature but perhaps more general than that. Marx, for one, understood that “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things coincided” (1971: 817).

Notes 1 Interviews with individuals representing diverse positions, from Anti-Fascist Action to Swedish Democrats were undertaken in the 1990s and early 2000s, a project financed by the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation. 2 See the debates surrounding Tariq Ramadan and Euro-Islam and the critical work of Bassem Tibi on Islamic colonization (2001, 2002, 2008). These are issues that do not exist because of inherent characteristics of one or another culture but because of a particular historical conjuncture. 3 This is common fare in EU political discourses as well, but they do not square with the levels of unemployment in the host countries in question, with the massive elimination of jobs due to technological change and the export of capital other parts of the world. 4 Republican here in the European meaning. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party in the United States.

9 Way-Finding: Respectfulness as a Performance Art Greg Dening

“Way-finding” is the term that modern islanders use to describe their craft and the craft of their ancestors in piloting their voyaging canoes around the Great Ocean, the Pacific, and the Sea of Islands. They prefer to call themselves way-finders rather than navigators. Navigation is a more universal science of instruments and the application of systems of time and space as broad as the cosmos itself. Way-finding is a more interpretive craft closer to the signs the systems of the cosmos imprint on the environment. No navigators would distance themselves from the myriad of signs in sea and sky, wind and water, that tell them where they are. Navigators, however, have the security that the system they are applying in their voyaging has a life outside them – in a book, an instrument, a map. For wayfinders no knowledge, no image is stilled either in time or in space. The temperature of the water, the movement of the waves, the seasons of the stars, the patterns of the winds, and the habits of the birds are all in their heads. And it is a knowledge that comes to them not through their own experience alone. It comes to them down through the ages of their line of masters and apprentices. Way-finders finds their way with style, as surfboarders ride their waves with style. No voyage is ever the same. Their way is always different, but always ruled by their confidence that they will find it (Kyselka 1987, Hau‘ofa 1993, Jolly 2007). I prefer, I must confess, to be a way-finder rather than a navigator in all my voyaging through learning and knowledge. Metaphors are the trade winds of the mind. Models are the doldrums.

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I first met Marshall Sahlins in print sixty years ago, in 1956. I read his “Esoteric Efflorescence in Easter Island” (1955). I remember being startled by it and perhaps feeling a little youthful jealousy of it. What startled me (I still have my notes on it) is that I read the article in the old reading room of the Victorian Public Library in Melbourne, with its dome almost as large as that of the British Library. Just seeing my notes makes me nostalgic for the magical hours I spent there. What startled me about the piece was Sahlins’s ability to read all that I was reading with different eyes. I identified those eyes at the time as “anthropological.” I thought of it as an ability to see quite particular and unique events as larger than themselves and to see them in the context of a rich “discourse” or “paradigm,” although to describe it with those words is now anachronistic. Sahlins was, at the time, like me, meeting his “Natives” in the library. He would have completed, if I have my dating correct, his doctorate at Columbia University at an extraordinarily young age – twenty-four years – in 1954. The book, Social Stratification in Polynesia (1958), that came out of his dissertation would have been in draft before he went to Fiji that year with his young wife, Barbara Vollen. Moala (Sahlins 1962a) was the ethnography that came out of that field trip. Library reading and observation has been the other long-lasting marriage in Sahlins’s life. That marriage has made him both a passionate traditionalist and a revolutionary thinker, perhaps a perfect example of that “specific evolution” of which he was a creative advocate in Evolution and Culture (1960a). Back in 1956, trying to see my “Natives” through the eyes of innumerable strangers, I was passionately historical and a little anti-anthropological. That was because British anthropology (the context of our colonial intellectual experience in Australia) was largely anti-historical, and American anthropology, as we experienced it in the Pacific, was unhistorical. Edward Tylor and Bronisław Malinowski, the architects of the British tradition, were anti-historical largely because they were fighting for a distinctive role for anthropology as a discipline against the dominant historical paradigm. The Americans were unhistorical in the Pacific because they were in “retrieval mode.” They could not bear to observe both the “disappearing” Pacific cultures and the coca-cola bottles littering the islanders’ beaches. We did not know what to call what we did in those days. It was certainly not “real history,” we were told in no uncertain terms. “Real history” was British history, the Renaissance, medieval history. “Natives”



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were unfashionable and infra dig. They still are in some circles. (I notice Lord Beloff recently sounding off about the need for writing the “real history” of empires – and by those at the centre of empire not at the margins.) I was one of the prize students at Melbourne University. My professor, when I told him I was going to Harvard to do anthropology the better to write the peculiar sort of history that I was interested in, said to me, “Dening, this is the end of your academic career.” We called what we did various names: “ethnohistory” for a time, then “culture contact,” “zero-point history.” However, each of those names was unsatisfactory. Ethnohistory seemed to suggest that we did history of the “civilized” and anthropology of the “Natives,” but we wanted to do history and anthropology, anthrohistory if you like, of the island peoples and the intruding strangers. “Cultures” don’t come in “contact.” “Culture contact” was a modelmaker’s concept, developed, if not born, in that most unhistorical resource, the Human Relations Area File. “Zero points” were supposedly those moments of the immediate Time-Before the encounters: there is denigration in that of all that came after. Supposedly, the zero point was the moment of true culture. But it is of the essence of cultures to be modern, to respond to a changing historical environment. Zero point denied creative Aboriginality. In Australia, at least, this has led to the denial of the essential modernity of Aboriginal culture and its depiction as a grotesque mimicry of the “civilized” (Dening 1966, 2001b). Whatever we called this two-sided history, inevitably there were large epistemological issues. The one was that both sides were changed forever by the encounter. Both sides were bound together by the encounter. Those of neither side ever after could see themselves or claim identity without the other. Those on both sides in discovering other possibilities inevitably enlarged their perceptions of themselves metaphorically. Those on both sides inevitably used the other to mirror themselves. The historian writing this changed and changing cultural environment bedevils two hundred years later. An historian does not observe the past. An historian only observes the texts by which the past has been ordered and given meaning. So discussing what “Natives” thought is only done through texts that changed that thinking by transforming it into a Euro-American form of writing and printing. Moreover, when the texts are not of “Natives” thinking but of Euro-Americans reporting what they thought “Natives” were thinking, the distance between the observer and the observed becomes even greater.

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The other epistemological issue was to become political very soon. When there is an event in encounters between peoples of different cultural perceptions, when the one event is actually perceived in totally different ways, from what perspective does one write a history of it? The event has two histories – well, many histories, but let’s focus on the distinct cultural histories. The overall history that is the historian’s is inevitably addressed to an understanding of something that never happened, a blending of the whole into some meaning that the parts never had, never could have. My solution (without argument here as to its propriety) was to play the historian and the anthropologist to both sides of the encounter and then, as well, to myself, the observer-historian. The epistemological issues were politicized in 1961 when Frantz Fanon published his Wretched of the Earth (see Fanon 1965). I don’t remember reading it before 1964. In a world of victims, Fanon wrote, there are no innocents. No one can write two-sided history who in some way benefits by the power of victors. No one can mediate between the disempowered living and the voiceless dead. Fanon shook me, I must confess, and made me wonder what was my place in the history I was writing and teaching. If I have resolved for myself through the years what that place is, it is because I feel that in a history so terrible as that of the Pacific, giving the dead a voice is reason enough for my history. I feel, too, with Marx that the function of my history is not so much to understand the world as to change it. If my history, by story and reflection, disturbs the moral lethargy of the living, then it fulfils a need. I have not silenced any voice by adding mine. Sahlins, in the meantime, was producing books of genius and creating paradigm shifts in anthropology. “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia” (Sahlins 1963b) set the parameters for discussion on cultural systems in the Pacific for twenty years. Culture and Practical Reason (Sahlins 1976b) was a major statement on the relationships between symbolic schemes of culture and the material constraints of physical living, an anthropological adjustment to accepted Marxism. In Stone Age Economics (1972) Sahlins fought against the reduction of economics to a need-satisfying rationalism, “an intellectual mode of Business.” The material life processes of society, in his view, were suffused with the same complexities as religion and politics and to the same end. He was, too, a passionate defender of cultural creativity in the great sociobiology debates of the 1970s and 1980s.



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Consistent through all this was Sahlins’s thesis that it was the cultural symbolic system that was the mode of ordinary human relationships. It clothed everything in discernible meanings. Meanings were discernible precisely because in the uniqueness of every experience there was also structure. Actions, gestures, expressions, rituals – every symbolic act – contained the specificity and generality combined in the famous Saussurean relationship of langue and parole. Cultures were as different as languages, as idiosyncratic within themselves as speech, but communicable because of their shared forms. Their differences were what made anthropology possible. The system in them, available to participants, was also available to the observer. Sahlins has always been skeptical, I think, of an anthropological history of one’s own culture. Difference, for Sahlins, has always been a cultural birthright and an anthropological Rosetta stone. I do not know what set Sahlins’s sights on Hawai‘i. I suspect that he was restless over unfinished business in Fiji. He rediscovered the quirky, maverick spirit of A.M. Hocart in Hocart’s own manuscript fieldnotes and Hocart’s study, Kingship (1927). Possibly Sahlins also discovered the value of enlarging Hocart’s insights into kingship through the whole of the Pacific, and he needed history to do that. Sahlins visited Australia in 1980: he went to Adelaide as president of the anthropology section of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS), and he became a founding member of the Pacific History Association formed in the Clare Valley that same year. I remember well the excitement of a younger generation of Pacific historians at Sahlins’s masterful performances. They were as startled by him in 1980 as I had been in 1956, and for much the same reasons. Suddenly, he was reading the texts they had read in new ways. He was seeing chieftaincy in the Pacific with the reflections born of decades of scholarship culminating in the discourses of Georges Dumézil and James George Frazer on the “stranger-king.” All of us had staged our own perceptions of the “kings” of the Pacific in the way the British, in particular, had created them to serve their imperial purposes. Sahlins, all of a sudden, displayed the ways in which Polynesian cultures could be entered by understanding the ways in which they balanced violent power and legitimating authority. Suddenly, too, a whole range of mythological and traditional texts became readable, not just for the old “Polynesian Problem” of where the islanders had come from, but for the way these texts created a narrative of

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the political and cultural adjustments made when violent strangers from the sea – the chiefs who came from “distant places” before the arrival of the Euro-Americans – came and lived permanently with the Natives of the land. Whatever took Sahlins to Hawai‘i, he found there the perfect theatre for his understanding, developed over thirty years, of how the structures of cultural systems merged with the unrepeatable particularities of cultural events. This was the killing of Captain James Cook by the Hawaiians in Kealakekua on 14 February 1779. The Natives of the land received Cook, a stranger coming from a “distant place,” during a season of the land (makahiki). The “Natives” called Cook, “Lono.” Lono was the “god” of makahiki. Sahlins’s anthro-history of the death of Cook makes sense of that. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981a) was Sahlins’s first definitive effort – if not his first revelation of his thesis – to weave this historical/mythical event into an understanding of anthropological theory. Then, in a series of most prestigious lectures in the most prestigious places the world over, Sahlins adjusted his argument, debated particularities, and filled out his proposition, becoming more certain in his thesis and more expert in his exhaustive knowledge surrounding the events. These lectures appeared as his Islands of History (1985a). During these years Sahlins put on hold a planned history of the Hawaiian islands to complete with Patrick Kirch what surely must be the most exhaustive “historical ethnography” and “archaeology of history” anywhere in the world of Native society under siege from intruding society and adapting to the changes. Anahulu (Kirch and Sahlins 1992, 2 vols), it is called. By any standard, it is a most extraordinary work. James Cook (1728–1779) was a Yorkshire villager and apprentice grocer, North Sea collier seaman, Royal Navy master at the battle of Quebec, Newfoundland hydrographic surveyor, Pacific explorer, fellow of the Royal Society, and culture hero. Cook is a man of myth and anti-myth and double-visioned history. In the history and theatre that colonizers made of him, Cook is the icon of humanistic, scientific empire. For the colonized, at least in the postcolonial period of the late twentieth century, Cook is the icon of the savage violence of empires in their encounters with Native peoples (Dening 2001a). In a sense, the general public and academic historians have been perfectly happy with the James Cook they had in the works of J.C. Beaglehole, Alan Villiers, and Richard Hough, and in literally hundreds of other biographies, histories, and coffee-table books. The



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only debate that seemed to interest them was whether Cook really did discover this or that island and place, or whether he had some secret knowledge of it all from the Portuguese. The general euphoria expressed in the reconstructed Endeavour suggests that culturally we still bathe in the sunshine of Cook’s humanism. Black Australians, Hawaiians, and Māoris don’t have that same sense of euphoria. What the “Natives” thought or did or had done to them is of no great interest when another sort of history has been thought to be “real.” Of course, that is not true for the cross-cultural histories being taught around the world in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (but perhaps not Britain) these past twenty years, nor for the literature and histories creating the present discourse about the encounters between Indigenous peoples and empires in all their forms. However, public perceptions of what happened in two-sided history are at least twenty years behind understandings that are fairly ordinary in academia (Dening 2003b). In those circumstances “debunking” is good publishing theatre. An unsuspecting public can be surprised into noticing a change in the paradigm. In 1992 Gananath Obeyesekere “came out” as the great debunker in his The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Ostensibly, his target was the imperial mythmakers who found self-satisfaction in the fact that savages saw their envoys, notably Cook, as “gods.” Actually Obeyesekere’s target was Marshall Sahlins. Rather self-righteously, Obeyesekere claimed that his own Sri Lankan origins gave him understandings of “Natives” that Sahlins could never have. It is an unpleasant book, wrong on many counts, ignorant of Polynesian religious-political experience, and severely lacking in historical interpretive skills, and it is a book in which theoretical constructs override ethnographic experience. Sahlins had the right to be offended by this personal attack on him. His reply in How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook for Example (1995) leaves no point unanswered, no insult not traded, no argument not closed. I suspect that not many readers have been patient with the detail. But then not many readers, especially reviewers and judges in prizes, had bothered to read Obeyesekere either. Most of reading in any case is the reduction of hundreds of thousands of words to a few sentences. The sentences to which Sahlins will be reduced are more important than all the sentences that will not be read. I would like to leave with one of his own. It goes to explain why How “Natives” Think is something more than

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a self-serving apologia. It holds the passion of four decades of his trying to see the hardest thing of all to see in anthro-history: difference. The ultimate victims, Sahlins says, in depriving them of independence of thought and in submitting their actions to some theoretical and ideological template, is the Hawaiian people themselves: “the Hawaiian people appear on the stage as the dupes of European ideology. Deprived thus of agency and culture, their history is reduced to a classic meaninglessness: they lived and they suffered – and then they died” (1995: 198). Sahlins prefers to give them a “real history” of their own. I have “way-found” my way to much the same conclusion as Marshall. We owe the past – of both sides of the beach, I would say – a “real history” of its own. I put it in different words. We owe the past as historians, we owe the people we observe as anthropologists, their own present, as they actually experience it. Their present – and ours – is always processual, is always in the present participle, I like to say. Ethnography, I have told my students for years, is about the present participle – not life, but living; not gender, but gendering; not culture, but culturing; not science, but sciencing. Not even change, but changing. I came to that conclusion long ago. When I compared the observations of Pacific island living by those who saw it from outside (from their ships or mission stations) and the observations of those who had to enter that living in some way (the beachcombers), I discovered that the set descriptions of roles, rules, and institutions, etc. offered none of the contingencies of the narratives of living experience (who actually marries whom, how tapu are obeyed, the distinctions of power and authority) of those who had left the comfort zones of their own cultures and experienced the behavioural metaphors of others (Dening 1974, 1980). Marshall and I have very different notions of what “real history” is. He will tell you that. He began his contribution, “The Discovery of the True Savage”(1994a), to my own Festschrift with a quotation from Lucian: “This then is my sort of historian … in his writing a foreigner, without city or country, living under his own law only, subject to no kin, nor caring what any man will like or dislike, but laying out the matter as it is” (41). Marshall followed with this: “Perhaps no one would be quicker to take issue with Lucian (or with me) than Greg Dening, since few scholars have explored the dialectic between our present and other peoples’ pasts than he, and perhaps



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no one has made the project of ‘laying out the matter as it is’ seem more chimerical” (ibid.). Marshall, dear friend, I began my MA dissertation on East Pacific prehistory (Dening, 1960b:ii) with this quotation from George Forster (1777): “The learned, at last grown tired of being deceived by the powers of rhetoric and by sophisticated arguments, raised a general cry after a simple collection of facts.” Oh, how proud I was of my distribution maps on “Elongated Ear-Lobes in Polynesia,” of “topknots,” of adze types, of the sweet potato, of pig, dog and chicken, of uninhabited islands, of accidental and deliberate voyages. You, Marshall, will know the “sophisticated arguments” of the likes of Thor Heyerdahl and Andrew Sharp that drove me to map topknots and gene frequencies and elongated earlobes. You will also know, Marshall, because you among anthropologists have practised it more than most, that “being there” for the historian is that feeling for the past that can only be matched by the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years that we sit at the tables in the archives. It is an assurance that our extravagance with time here is rewarded with a sensitivity that comes in no other way. It is an overlaying of images on one another. It is a realization that knowledge of the past is cumulative and kaleidoscopic, extravagantly wasteful of our energy. And it is a pilgrimage. The past doesn’t come to me. I must go to wherever different cultural and social systems conserve it. Where ever that is – London, Paris, Boston, Leningrad, Nantucket, small archives and attics and drawers – it is most preciously on pieces of paper inscribed by pen or pencil in the moments they represent. It is precious to see the love or hate or pride or power in these millions of pieces of paper. But, Marshall, you are correct. The mysterious relationship between past and present has preoccupied my scholarly and professional life both as researcher and writer and as educator of those who will take our place. I use the word “mysterious” advisedly. I like a word some of us have invented, “historying.” History – the past transformed into words or paint or dance or music or play – is our noun. Historying is our verb-noun. Historying is the unclosed action of making histories. History, the noun, is closed, shaped, a product. Historying is process, never done, dialectical, and dialogic. Gossiping, explaining to the taxman, pleading not guilty to the judge, eulogies over the grave – historying actions are manifold, each with a moral dimension. Historying for those of us who

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are likely to be reading this is more defined – not by topic, not by period, not by method, not by style, not by interpretive agreement. None of us is the clone of any other. None of us is the clone of our teachers. None of our students is a clone of us. Our historying is as idiosyncratic as our fingerprints. Are we joined together in our historying, though? Yes, we are I would like to say. Historying is not just making history. It is also educating, supervising, examining, researching, reviewing, being members of professional associations, advising governments and institutions, giving public face to scholarship in the media, sharing the burdens of administration in committees of all descriptions, applying for research grants, being paid for some of it, being freely generous with time and energy for the sake of ideals, being conscious that all this is self-interested in personal ambitions, in institutional rivalries, in the scramble for funded support. There are schemers and frauds and nastiness in such historying. But altruism and ideals suffuse it, too. There is a passion that such knowledge is public, that it be subject to critical appraisal, that it serve a good greater than the individual’s fame (Dening 2002). For me, the joy of these last fifty years of historying (1957–2007) has been something of the exhilaration I had seen in the last fifty years of the eighteenth century (1757–1807). The “Enlightened,” they called themselves. “They dared to know,” as Immanuel Kant said of them. They dared to know by engaging themselves in the naming process of discourse. We know the comfort it brings. The “Enlightenment” of one century is the “structuralism,” “neo-Marxism,” and “postmodernism” of another. The recognition of keywords, a sense of the metaphoric nature of styles of thought, a feeling that what one has just read is what one was about to say, knowing the truth in the caricatures of oppositional stands made by one’s associates, knowing, on the other hand, how untrue the stereotypifications are of oneself – all the stuff by which paradigms are made – have given a wondrous lift to these past fifty years (Dening 1994). Marshall is worried by postmodernism. So am I. I have no use for it either as a literary or any other type of theory. But I am not worried by my postmodernity, or as I prefer to call it, my neo-modernity. My modernity is my respect for both the past and the present as something that has happened and is happening in a particular way independently of our knowing it. My modernity is born of the hundreds of years of knowledge advancement that have entered our



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souls. We see the advantage of perspective, of focused inquiry. We are bound to exhaustive research. My modernity demands that I be engaged at all times in critical dialogue and an effort to filter my knowledge as far as it is humanly possible from prejudice and error. We all have disciplined minds. That is our protection and our inspiration. I never let myself be called “interdisciplinary.” “Multi-disciplinary,” yes. It is my obligation to enter the economies of language and knowledge of all the disciplines I use so as to see their limitations, their ambiguities. But we belong to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We know the fictions of our languaging. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Clifford Geertz, Jacques Derrida, and hundreds of films and novels have told us them. We know both the possibilities and the limits of our knowing. We know how brokenly we know. We know as well that if we begin with the real, we will always have to enlarge it with imagination. This is our renewal of our modernity, our neo-modernity. This makes us different sorts of writers of history. We know our various voices, we know our author-ity. We know all the tricks of representation. This now is our realism, our non-fiction, if you like. It is invidiously selective to give a litany of names one would bless for their inspiration over fifty years of living discourse. But why not? In philosophy and theology: Joseph Maréchal, Teilhard de Chardin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Rahner. In history: Marc Bloch, R.G. Collingwood, R.H. Tawney, E.P. Thompson, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Robert F. Berkhofer, Bernard Smith. In reflective thought: Roland Barthes, Richard Rorty, Michel de Certeau. In anthropology: Claude Lévi-Strauss, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, Richard White, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and of course, Marshall Sahlins. And mentors. Who doesn’t need mentors? John Mulvaney, Harry Maude, Doug Oliver. For me the springtime of these fifty years was 1954–60. Botanists, glottochronologists, geneticists buzzed about the “Polynesian Problem” – where did the Polynesians come from and how? We discovered that disciplines were about creating languages and being comfortable with different sets of blinkers. These were years of innocence in which we read E.D. Merrill on botany, Bengt Anell on fishhooks, Roger Duff on adzes, A.C. Haddon and James Hornell on canoes, Peter H. Buck on material culture, Edwin G. Burrows on boundaries, E.S.C. Handy on religion, and Katherine Luomala on myths in the belief that we were doing history. We felt immodestly

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superior to the antiquarians of the Pacific – Elsdon Best, Percy Smith, and F.W. Christian. Their vast knowledge only served madcap theories about Polynesian origins and movements. In out of the way places from Finland to New Zealand, from Leningrad to Valparaiso, men and women had collected the products of their experience of the Pacific. We felt that there was not an archive or a library or a museum, a learned society or a colonial bureaucracy in all of Europe and the Americas in which ethnographic experience of the Pacific was not texted in some way. That immense variety of texts – logs, diaries, letters, journals, government reports, lectures, books, notes, written-down oral traditions, notes of memories – encapsulated the experience of those who made the texts as well as the otherness of nature and cultures that was experienced. We thought that the peculiar joy of Pacific history was to catch the seers, the seen, and the seeing. So, Marshall, I don’t think the relationship between past and present chimerical. I think it to be mysterious. “Mystery,” mysterium, is a word that comes out of Roman religious practices and sacramental theology. A mystery is a truth that is so complicated that it can only be experienced through play or parable or ritual. It has to be experienced in some way, and it will always be changed or enlarged in the experiencing. Mysteries are never closed. Mystery plays, whether they are of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ or in the calendaric struggle of Lono and Ku, are rarely predictors of behaviour. They are interpretive understandings in the moment after. The relationship between past and present is neither “chimerical” nor an “ever-decreasing hermeneutical circle.” It is a never-ending conversation. No sentence of ours will ever bring it to a full stop (Dening 2006). The present in that dialogue with its past is inevitably political. Aboriginality – a present connectedness or identification with a distanced and greatly different past – is the prime political issue for settler and post-colonial societies that have seen Indigenous peoples dispossessed of their lands, and their cultures consciously destroyed. Historying I take to be those sensual, emotional, mindful, bodily, and spiritual processes by which peoples collectively or personally read the signs of that surrounding metaphoric presence of the past and know that they truly belong to that past and that past truly belongs to them. Historying, for those seeking their Aboriginality in that sense, seems to have too broad a dimension and even an



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invalid one for those opposed to their political aspirations. But that denial itself is more political than ethnographically valid, it seems to me. Our own cultural historying is just as broad, and we have a very precise notion of its different validities in different cultural circumstances. I like to think of a phenomenology of the past, much in the same way as Walter Ong (1982: 73) wrote of the phenomenology of sound in an oral culture – its centring, surrounding action, rather than its directional qualities. The past, especially in traditional societies, like sound, is a surrounding, suffusing cultural environment of recognizable metaphors. That ever-present past is I. That everpresent past is We. Historying, in my understanding, is a common, everyday phenomenon. It is Everyperson’s fine sense of the poetics of their history making (Dening 1990). In the springtime, the years 1954–60, and now in the autumn, the years 2004–07, of my engagement with what I have learned to call the Sea of Islands, I met up with, and now have come to recognize in a new light, a most remarkable man: Tupaia was his name (Dening 1986, 1989; Salmond 2003: 113–34; Thomas 1997: 1–5; Williams 2003). I would like to tell his story as an example of the dialogue between present and past in the broad sense of this historying. In 1769 Tupaia created an image of the phenomenology of the past of the Sea of Islands: he drew a map. Tupaia was a priest from the sacred island of Ra‘iātea in the Tahitian cluster of islands. He was a priest in the formal sense of that word. He was a man of establishment, a guardian of tradition, a master of ceremony and ritual, and a man of sacrifice. In saying Tupaia was a priest, we are saying that he was not a prophet. The gods did not possess him, make him shiver and quake and speak in tongues, or manipulate good and evil fortunes. No, Tupaia was a priest, a political manager of supernatural worlds. Tupaia was a priest of ‘Oro. ‘Oro had come to the sacred island of Ra‘iātea on a rainbow. ‘Oro, as a feathered thing, travelled around the islands in his canoe called Rainbow. Rainbows, feathers, canoes – all of ‘Oro’s symbols were of crossings, between heavens and earth, air and ground, sea and land. ‘Oro’s temples were places of crossings. They stood on points of land looking to an opening in the reef. Taputapuātea was their name, Sacrifices from Abroad. Taputapuātea had narratives in their architecture about crossing beaches, about encounters in place, about assuaging violent power. ‘Oro’s canoe, bearing sacrifices on its prow, would beach itself on the Seaward

Figure 9.1a.  Tupaia’s chart. Drawn by Emily Brissenden, after 1.133, p. 130, in The Charts and Coastal Views of Captain Cook’s Voyages, vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771, ed. Andrew David (London: Hakluyt Society, 1988).

Figure 9.1b.  Identifiable islands on Tupaia’s chart. Drawn by Emily Brissenden.

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side of Taputapuātea. Standing on a stone between the Seaward side and the Landward side, his feet too sacred to stand on the ground around, the ari‘i nui, the high chief, would eat the eyes of the sacrifices. That would soften the violence in him. He would then be wrapped in the feathered symbols of ‘Oro, be given his titles, and established in his authority by that. Then in a world turned upside down, he would have shit and semen poured over him, and be taught his proper place in the order of things by that, be made the shit of gods. On the Landward side of Taputapuātea was a place of communion. Sacrifice and communion always go together. It was a place of feasting. It was also a treasure house of sacred paraphernalia and memory. It was a place where traditions were sung and souvenirs of encounters were kept. A portrait of James Cook by John Webber was kept in the Taputapuātea at Matavai through all these years, as well as the red hair of the Bounty barber, as well as the skulls of two mutineers killed on the island. These Taputapuātea were Pacific representations of the sort of crossings that, in an island world, had to be made between sea and land. It was a liturgical map of the beach. Tupaia was the manager of the theatre of these sacred spaces. In fact, in 1760 he had brought from Ra‘iātea one of those stones on which the ari‘i stood to receive the sacrifices. That stone was the foundation stone transported from Taputapuātea on Ra‘iātea to Taputapuātea on Tahiti. I think that simple fact significant. Tupaia knew the civilizing processes in his own Native islands well. Tupaia knew the virtual realities of abstractions, the subjunctive world, the “as if” world of the reifications of state, kingship, law, economy. Tupaia would easily translate flags, uniforms, military order, and the theatre of power into something he understood. Tupaia first met the other world that would change his world forever in July 1767. It was at Matavai on the northwest coast of Tahiti. Captain Samuel Wallis’s Dolphin had been anchored there for a couple of weeks. They had been a terrible few weeks. The “Dolphins” had killed they did not know how many islanders – as many as a flock of birds, a shoal of fish, the Tahitians said. Tupaia came to Matavai when the relations between the English and the Tahitians were more settled. He came with Purea whom the English took to be Queen. They presumed they had killed her King in the first massacre. Purea, they would say, gave them Tahiti. Tupaia came with



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Purea from the Taputapuātea he had established for her. They came with Purea’s son, who held from his father and his mother the highest title on the island. They had already begun their translation of their encounter with the English. They would incorporate the flag of possession that Wallis had erected in Matavai into the sacred feather girdle of ‘Oro that would be wrapped around the ari‘i nui on his Taputapuātea stone. James Cook would later see it among the sacred treasures of ‘Oro’s temple and William Bligh was to draw it. When Tupaia boarded the Dolphin, the “Dolphins” sensed he was of superior rank, even a priest. They gave him the name Jonathan. Tupaia was curious about everything on board the ship. He learned things by touching and handling them, sometimes the hard way – that a teapot held boiling water, for example. A cameo portrait of Wallis’s wife sent him into raptures. It was a fascination with representation that never left him, as we shall see. The officers of the Dolphin fussed over him. They sat him down to dinner, a large dinner – chicken broth, roast fowl, roast pork, roast yams, plantains, bananas, soft bread, biscuit, apple pudding, apple pie, and a cup of tea. Tupaia mimicked the etiquette around the table, and was embarrassed when he got things wrong, like putting his fingers in the butter, or as they invited him to do for the laugh of it, wipe his mouth on the tablecloth, since he did not have a pocket handkerchief such as they used. There is much of the civilizing process in the private spaces of good table manners. Norbert Elias has taught us that. There is also much hegemony in the laughter at bungled Native mimicry of civilized ways. The Dolphins decked out their “Jonathan” in a complete suit of clothing before they left. In this garb and to their patronizing smiles, he returned to the beach and there delighted a large crowd of islanders with the theatre of his encounter. Tupaia’s next encounter was with James Cook and Joseph Banks. Tupaia’s political status had changed between the visit of the Dolphin and the visit of the Endeavour, but his usefulness to Cook and Banks was greatly enlarged. He was their guide, interpreter, and informant. In the end Banks decided to take Tupaia back to England. He would not cost as much as the lions and tigers his neighbours collected, Banks mused. Every encounter of the Endeavour with Indigenous peoples from that moment on was mediated by Tupaia – through the central

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Pacific, all around New Zealand’s north and south islands, all along the eastern coast of Australia. By the time they leave Australia, Tupaia’s body is scoured and bruised with scurvy. It has no immunity left against the fevers of Batavia. Tupaia is one of the first of thirty-six of Cook’s men to die there. Not before leaving us with a brilliant heritage, however. In the great cabin of the Endeavour, Tupaia saw James Cook bending over his chart table. He saw Sydney Parkinson, the painter, at his easel working his oils and watercolours. So Tupaia made a map of his ocean world, and he started painting. In his map and in his paintings we have Tupaia equipping himself with new skills to represent something old within him. They are Pacific representations of extraordinary brilliance, it seems to me. As Tupaia acted as the master of ceremonies for all of Cook’s encounters with Indigenous peoples, he insisted on the protocols that needed to be observed. Respect and reverence in body gesture and pose, exchange of true gifts not trade, and obeisance to the true titles of the place in that sacred space where they resided. (Marshall, a small note for you: I think that Cook after the disasters of the encounters to this point on this Third Voyage, remembered the instructions Tupaia gave him at Ra‘iātea and followed them at Kealakeua. Hence, all his out-of-character gestures as “Lono.”) In all of Tupaia’s encounters, he would engage himself in discussion of the titles and origins of the places he visited. It made him famous throughout New Zealand. Among the Māori, Tupaia was remembered for generations longer than Cook. The Māori named a cave for him where he slept, a well that he dug, and their children after him. For many years there has been a series of painting from the Endeavour identified only as by “The Artist of the Chief Mourner.” Just a few years ago, a note was discovered in Joseph Banks’s papers saying that “The Artist of the Chief Mourner” was Tupaia. By that they become an extraordinary archive of the 1769 encounter. Like his map of the Ocean of Titles, Tupaia’s paintings focus on the larger narratives of Tahitian life (Williams 2003). We have Tupaia’s map painting of Taputapuātea. He draws the Seaward sacrificial space separate from the Landward feasting and memorializing space, with ‘Oro’s canoe, Rainbow, in between. We have his depiction of long-distance navigational canoes and, in the background, the vegetable foods they brought: plantain, coconuts,



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and breadfruit. And we have the meeting place where their stories were told, As well as the war canoes. The sea was without the order of the land. We have the theatre of Tahitian memories – the musicians and the dancers. When Tupaia was in New Zealand, he painted the theatre of gift exchange, ruled over by the eye, the source of power. On the Australian coast, Tupaia was intrigued by the primitiveness of the canoes and the utter nakedness of the people. He painted a picture of the Gweagal people fishing Botany Bay – a vision of one about-to-be-colonized people of another about-to-be-colonized people. Tupaia called the Gweagal ta‘ata ino, “rubbish,” as the pool of sacrificial victims was called in Tahiti. He painted them deeply black: blackness unbleached by the cosmetics of the elite was the sign of their victimhood. And he saw their eyes. Tupaia always saw the eyes (Smith 1985). I find it hard to contain my wonder and awe at these Pacific repre­sentations, these transformations of Tupaia’s self into something else. All the way from Tahiti to Batavia, in whatever direction the Endeavour sailed or in whatever foreign conditions it reached, Tupaia always knew the direction of home and its distance. When the ship reached Batavia, the first thing that Tupaia noticed was that all the different peoples, different in their colour and their looks, wore their different Native costumes. Tupaia looked at himself and saw himself in the slops of ship’s clothing. He threw them away and dressed himself in his Native tapa cloth. That was his last gesture of identity; he died wrapped in the red tapa of his ari‘i and priestly status. James Cook arrived in the Sea of Islands in the Endeavour in 1769. He was there to observe the Transit of Venus. He was part of a longue durée of science that joined an ancient Greek, Eratosthenes, measuring the size of the earth from the shadows of poles in different places at noon, with Cook making his observations to measure the size of the universe from the solar parallax. Cook, of course, was observing the unobservable. He was not observing the extent of the universe. He was observing the evermore finely calibrated instruments and socializing himself to the “as if” world of his measuring, and immersing himself in a special language, and he came out realizing that he had seen unseeable distances (Dening 1995). Cook, however, was mystified. He did not yet know the vastness of the ocean around him. He did, however, know that only a few

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islands had been “discovered” to the European mind. Cook was to come to realize that there was not one island (from among some 10,000 to 15,000 of them) that had not been settled or visited, he knew not how many years before him. As it happened, Cook was to meet this genius among the Tahitians, Tupaia, who would tell him something of what he did not know. He told Cook of some 147 islands in the Sea of Islands that he knew of. He offered to draw Cook a map of them. Let’s look at Tupaia’s map (see Figures 9.1a and 9.1b). We don’t have Tupaia’s original drawing of his map. It has been lost. We only have English interpretations of it. Or rather we only have English misinterpretations of it. Tupaia’s Ocean of Islands arcs across 7,000 kilometres of the central Pacific, from the Marquesas in the east to the Fijis in the west. There are islands to which he himself has sailed – most remarkably, islands ten days’ sailing to the west from which it takes thirty days’ sailing against the prevailing winds to return. There are islands 600 kilometres across open sea to the south to which Tupaia pilots the Endeavour with pinpoint accuracy. A great number of the 70 islands on the map (he originally named 147) we can’t identify. Mostly this is probably because the names are as archaic as the knowledge they represent. There is something else as well. Tupaia’s map, as I now understand it, is an Ocean of Titles, or of sacred places where titles reside. It is these titles that Tupaia instructed Cook to acknowledge (Dening 1962; David 1988: 130–3; Forster 1996: 303–16; Finney 1998). Tupaia’s original map was a stilled moment in 1769 in the phenomenology of a 2,000-year past. Now, in these first decades of the third millennium, Tupaia’s map is an icon of how the present-day Sea Peoples of the Sea of Islands join themselves to it in their Aboriginality. I first studied Tupaia’s map over fifty years ago. It was a brilliant and innocent time of my academic life, as I have said. It was innocent because we thought that our expertise somehow gave us ownership of the past. I suppose it has been the most important lesson of my life to learn that the past belongs first to those on whom it impinges, and that one function of our expertise is to help give voice to those who truly own the past. At the time, fifty years ago, we were preoccupied by the thesis of a curmudgeon New Zealand scholar, Andrew Sharp (1956), who argued that the Pacific was peopled by accident. The legends of its



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peopling were pure myth, he claimed. We were innocent, too, in thinking that our argument with Sharp was purely academic. We did not understand how politically destructive Sharp’s thesis was to Pacific island, especially the Māori, cultural self-esteem. I just thought him wrong (Dening 1960a). I showed him to be wrong in my first performance of respectfulness. Respectful – and a sense of wonder. I had the deepest sense of admiration for this Sea People and their skills. I do all my sailing; I meet all my “Natives,” in the library. I’ve always felt that humility is a virtue that both historians and anthropologists should have. We live others’ lives so vicariously. We enter others’ metaphors so superficially. We need to be humble. We need to be respectful. That first act of respect, born of a trust that there was historical truth that I could discover in this past that engulfed the islanders, was to scour all the archival sources I could to discover all voyaging by Pacific Islanders done without European navigational technology. These voyages could be accidental or deliberate. I made a map of 218 of them (Dening 1962: 137–53). That map of 218 voyages allowed me to say how long deliberate voyages over open ocean could be, about 600 kilometres. Accidental voyages were not necessarily catastrophic because of the islanders’ capacity to make a landfall within a 300-kilometre circumference of even the lowest atoll. After that I had no doubt that these Sea People had made their Sea of Islands their own. They trade. They raid. They adventure. They way-find. They have an artifact of cultural genius to do it all, their va‘a, their canoe. Fifty years on, I read Tupaia’s map differently. In 1769 Tupaia was answering Cook’s questions. In 1954 I was countering Sharp’s arguments about the truth of Tupaia’s map. Now I look with even more wonderment at that map. A 2,000-year past is there, like sound, a surrounding presence in that map. Its historiography is of all the ways these islands came into the mind of one man, Tupaia, and was made present by stories told, by dancing them, by ritual memorializing. Tupaia annotated his map orally to Cook with stories of these islands, but Cook wasn’t interested in anything else than their direction and distance. In contrast, when Tupaia went to Aotearoa with the Endeavour, all he told the Māori of the Sea of Islands from which their ancestors came intrigued them. Tupaia is famous still among the Māori. Places and children are named after him (Dening 2004a, 2004b).

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Let me tell how present-day people of the Sea of Islands seek their Aboriginality inherent in the metaphor thatTupaia’s map holds. Let me say first that it would be fraudulent of me to insinuate that this story is about my engagement in the issue alone. There are scholars whom I admire immensely standing beside me here. To mention only a few: Thomas Gladwin (1970), David Lewis (1972), Patrick Kirch (2000), Roger and Kaye Green (1968), Patrick Kirch and Roger Green (2001), and Geoffrey Irwin (1992). In 1975 a friend of mine, Ben Finney, a fellow Harvard anthropology graduate, began a project for much the same reason that I had begun my studies of Tupaia’s map: to prove Andrew Sharp wrong. He wanted to do this by building a Hawaiian voyaging canoe and to sail, without intrusive navigational knowledge or instruments, the epic voyages of the island ancestors – between Hawai‘i and Tahiti, between Tahiti and Aotearoa, and between Fenua‘enata and Hawai‘i and Rapanui (Easter Island). These voyages have been an extraordinary achievement. There is no point in being romantic about them. The thirty years of this odyssey have had their pain and conflict, their tragedies and failures, their political machinations, their greed, and their absurdities. They also have been courageous overall triumphs, tapping wellsprings of cultural pride in a sense of continuity with a voyaging tradition. This has not just been in Hawai‘i, but in Tahiti, Samoa, and Aotearoa as well. Everywhere that he has gone it has been the same. The landfall has been a theatre of who island peoples are, who they have been (Finney 1994, 2003). I would like to go to 1995 when the theatre of this re-enactment voyaging came to a climax. Seven voyaging canoes collected at the sacred island of Ra‘iātea in the Tahitian group. Ra‘iātea was Tupaia’s island. There Tupaia had given Cook his first lesson in the protocols for a first encounter with islanders. On the shining liminal space of a beach where the waves soak into the sand – a space where important Tahitian ritual transformations were staged – Cook had been instructed to show respect by disrobing in some way, then he should offer pure gifts, not trade, then offer some sacrifice in the sacred space where the titles of possession of the island were kept. At Ra‘iātea was also Taputapuātea, perhaps the most sacred place in all the Sea of Islands, a place of sacrifice. Tupaia was its priest. The re-enactment voyages had long outlived their function as simply an argument against Sharp’s denial of their possibility. They



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had become signs of the living vitality of a long cultural past. The re-enactment voyages had become empowering metaphors of identity. That identity was a conjoined one – not just a sense of the legitimacy of their continuity with individual island cultures, but an identity of shared Nativeness to the Sea of Islands, and identity reaching back to that first remarkable voyage from Tonga to Fenua‘enata (the Marquesas). The accidents of my own intellectual engagement take me to this re-enactment theatre (Dening 2003a). If young islander scholars, and indeed their elders, were beside me here, they would be taking you to their poetry, their novels, and their plays. Or they would be describing to you their experiments in historiography in their doctoral theses. Their histories, they would tell you, are things of both mind and body. Their science is to be artful. They express their historiography in new modes, like dancing. Most of all, I think, they would be exposing to you the treasure trove of their languages to show to you how they are continually discovering that the English words they use, like past, future, history, time, and space, are infused with meanings that let them know how different they are from the hegemonic culture in their Aboriginality (Hereniko 1995, Kame‘eleihiwa 1992, Teaiwa 1994, Trask 1999, Wood 2003). Taputapuātea was an ideal place to play at this conjoined identity for the seven canoes (see Finney 1999; Dening 2004a, 2004b). The mythic songs the voyagers chanted were anthems of union and treaty. The themes of these chants were recognizable from as far away as Aotearoa, Tonga, and Hawai‘i. I suppose one of the greatest pleasures in these autumnal years of my scholarly life has been to describe that first settlement voyage (2,000 years ago) from Tonga to Fenua‘enata. The marvel of that voyage is that the twelve or so adults who made it had in their minds, bodies, and spirits all that we came to see as “Polynesia” from Aotearoa to Hawai‘i to Rapanui east of Tonga and Samoa. Catharsis, it seems to me is not a piecemeal thing. It is whole and one. It is a reduction of complexity to simplicity in a blink. Rituals, on the other hand, can be piecemeal, blaring, empty, contradictory, driven by many forces. So the ritual at Taputapuātea to welcome and send off the voyaging canoes was uncomfortable, hot, and boring to many there. The French powers-that-be were inclined to speak of such rituals as “folkloric” and bend to the politics in them with some cynicism, born of the belief that they are at least a boost to

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tourism. So at Taputapuātea, anti-nuclear protest songs competed electronically with ancient chants and fundamentalist Christian hymns expressing dismay at modern libertarianism. The experience of thousands was kaleidoscopic. But the catharsis was not. As the thousands took their leave, the social memory of it was one. They had looked at the past and seen the future. They were confident that their living culture was a metaphoric thing and that they had seen the metaphor at work in the Sea of Islands. These past twelve years I have become an “adjunct professor.” I don’t know what “adjuncting” is, but I do it very conscientiously. It is a sort of academic grandparenting. Young scholars come to me. We enjoy one another for a short time, and we all go home. I engage these young doctoral students from all disciplines and professions, from archaeology to zoology, in their creative imagination in the presentation of their scholarly knowledge. I challenge them to perform that knowledge in ways that they have never tried. I like as well to present them with the lights of the university also in performance mode – the professor of dancing beside the professor of astrophysics, the professor of literature beside the professor of anthropology, the professor of music composition beside the professor of history. None of us can speak to our expertise in such varied company, only to our experience, our ideals, our disappointments, our successes and failures, our tricks of trade (Dening 1992, 2000). Respectfulness, I tell them, is a performance art. You have to wonder a little in order to understand, to admire in order to enter someone else’s metaphor. You have to be silent to listen. You have to know yourself to know others. All of us are storytellers, I tell them. True storytellers, tellers of true stories, whether we are measuring the edges of the universe, whether we are sifting the dirt in our archaeological pits, or whether we are historying. We observe. We reflect. We write. We claim authority but have no other power than to persuade. We make theatre about trivial and everyday things, and about awful and cruel realities. Maybe we write to change the world. We tell our stories, but there is never any closure to them. There is always another sentence to the conversation that we have joined. There is always another slant on the story that we have told. We live by our creativity and originality, but we cannot plumb the depth of our



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intellectual and cultural plagiarism. Plato, Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and so many others are in our minds somewhere. So is our postmodernity, whether we like it or not. We know – because our everyday living performances are never separated from our academic performances – how liberated we have been by the painters, dancers, composers, film directors, novelists, and poets on our cultural horizons. Just by being everyday cultural performers in our own times we know that performance art engages the whole body, all the senses, all the emotions. Not just the mind, not just rationality. Performance art has given us a multitude of narrative strategies for our stories. We know that formulaic monotone won’t do what we want it to do – persuade, convince, change, enter into somebody else’s consciousness in a meaningful way. We have to be artful. We must take out the cliché, not just from our concepts and words, but from the very structure of our presentations. To be read, we must write to the tropes of our times (Dening 1990, 1993, 2002). Our ethnographies – our histories – I tell them must be art. There is no art in multiplying the reifications. Art is the dismantling of reifications. In art there is one cultural miracle. Every difference has a sameness. Every smallness a largeness. Every shape, every colour, every gesture a theory. In a performance art we need the directness of a novelist, the choosiness of a poet, the discontinuity of a filmmaker, the engagement of a violinist.

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2005b. “Hierarkia, tasa-arvo ja anarkian sublimaatio: Länsimainen illuusio ihmisluonnosta.” Suomen Antropologi 30(4): 3–18. 2005d. “Preface.” Ethnohistory 52(1): 3–6. 2005e. “Structural Work: How Microhistories Become Macrohistories and Vice Versa.” Anthropological Theory 5(1): 5–30. 2008a. “The Conflicts of the Faculty.” Anthropology News 49(1): 5–6. 2008b. “Leslie A. White.” New York Times Magazine, 19 Sept., MM82. 2008c. “The Stranger-King or, Elementary Forms of the Politics of Life.” Indonesia and the Malay World 36(105): 177–99. 2008d. The Western Illusion of Human Nature. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. 2008e. “Interview with Marshall Sahlins.” Anthropological Theory 8(3): 319–28. 2009a. “In the Absence of the Metaphysical Field: An Interview with Marshall Sahlins.” http://ucexchange.uchicago.edu/interviews/ sahlins.html. 2009b. “The Teach-Ins: Anti-War Protest in the Old Stoned Age.” Anthropology Today 25(1): 3–5. 2009c. “The Conflicts of the Faculty.” Critical Inquiry 35(4): 997–1018. 2010a. “Infrastructuralism.” Critical Inquiry 36(3): 371–85. 2010b. “The Whole Is a Part: Intercultural Politics of Order and Change.” In Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology, ed. Ton Otto and Niles Bubandt, 102–26. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. 2011a. “Twin-Born with Greatness: The Dual Kingship of Sparta.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1(1): 63–101. 2011b. “What Kinship Is (Part One).” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(1): 2–19. 2011c. “What Kinship Is (Part Two).” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(2): 227–42. 2011d. “Iraq: The State-of-Nature Effect.” Anthropology Today 27(3): 26–31. 2011e. “The Alterity of Power and Vice Versa, with Reflections on Stranger-Kings and the Real-Politics of the Marvelous.” In Power in History: From Medieval Ireland to the Post-Modern World, ed. Anthony McElligott, Liam Chambers, Ciara Breathnach, and Catherine Lawless, 283–308. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. 2012a. “Alterity and Autochthony: Austronesian Cosmologies of the Marvelous.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 131–60. 2012b. “Introduction to the New Edition: J. Prytz Johansen: Kant among the Maori.” In The Maori and His Religion in Its Non-Ritualistic Aspects [1954], ed. J. Prytz Johansen, viii–x. Manchester: HAU.

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2012c. “Discours de réception du doctorat honoris causa de l’université Paris-Descartes.” In La Culture et les Sciences de l’Homme: Un Dialogue avec Marshall Sahlins, ed. Erwan Dianteill, 241–52. Paris: Archives Karéline. 2013a. What Kinship Is – and Is Not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013b. “Human Science.” London Review of Books 35(9): 29–32. 2013c. “Foreword.” In Beyond Nature and Culture, by Phillipe Descola, xi– xiv. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013d. “Dear Colleagues – And Other Colleagues.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(3): 337–47. 2013e. “Difference.” Oceania 83(3): 281–94. 2013f. “China U.” The Nation, 13 Nov.: 37–41. 2013g. “On the Culture of Material Value and the Cosmography of Riches.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(2): 161–95. 2014a. “On the Ontological Scheme of Beyond Nature and Culture.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(1): 281–90. 2014b. “Stranger Kings in General: The Cosmo-logics of Power.” In Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds, ed. Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad, 137–63. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2015a. “An Anthropological Manifesto: Or, the Origin of the State.” Anthropology Today 31(2): 8–11. 2015b. Confucius Institutes: Academic Malware. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Works by Sahlins as Co-author or Co-editor, Arranged Chronologically 1960. Sahlins, Marshall, Elman Rogers Service, and Thomas G Harding, eds. Evolution and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1965. Helm, June, Paul Bohannan, and Marshall Sahlins, eds. Essays in Economic Anthropology: Dedicated to the Memory of Karl Polanyi. New York: AMS Press. 1973. Sahlins, Marshall, and Dorothy Barrère. “William Richards on Hawaiian Cultural and Political Conditions of the Islands in 1841.” Hawaiian Journal of History 7: 18–40. 1979. Barrère, Dorothy, and Marshall Sahlins. “Tahitians in the Early History of Hawaiian Christianity: The Journal of Toketa.” Hawaiian Journal of History 13: 19–35. 1992. Kirch, Patrick, and Marshall Sahlins. Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Contributors

Manuela Carneiro da Cunha is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, as well as the University of Sã0 Paulo. She is also a member of the Brazilian Academy of Science. Her books include Negros, estrangeiros: Os escravos libertos e sua volta à Africa and História dos índios no Brasil. Greg Dening was the Max Crawford Professor of History at the University of Melbourne and adjunct professor at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University, Canberra. His books include Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self and Church Alive! Pilgrimages of Faith 1956–2006. Ann Fienup-Riordan is an independent scholar associated with the Calista Elders Council in Anchorage, Alaska. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1980 and has authored a dozen books on Yup’ik peoples. Jonathan Friedman is a professor of anthropology at the University of California at San Diego and Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He has conducted research in Hawai‘i and the Republic of Congo. Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of Leviathans at the Gold Mine. Martha Kaplan is a professor of anthropology at Vassar College specializing in the study of ritual and colonial and post-colonial

292 Contributors

societies. She has done research in Fiji, India, the United States, and Singapore. Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mend Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories; Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter ; and Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. John D. Kelly is a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He does research in Fiji and in India, on topics including ritual in history, knowledge and power, semiotic and military technologies, colonialism and capitalism, decolonization and diasporas. Claude Lévi-Strauss was one of the greatest anthropologists of the twentieth century. A founder of structuralism, he held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France and was a member of the Académie Française. Jocelyn Linnekin is a professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut. She studies ethnological theory, gender, cultural identity and nationalism, historical anthropology, and comparative politics as well as the Pacific Islands, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Joel Robbins is the Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University. He has carried out research focused on Christianity and cultural change among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea and the rapid globalization of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. Daniel Rosenblatt is an assistant professor of anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa. He has conducted research in Aotearoa/ New Zealand on the performance and experience of local cultural traditions and identities in the context created by such transnational forces as capitalism, colonialism, modernity, and globalization. Serge Tcherkézoff is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he specializes in the study of Samoa and in the history of European colonialism in the Pacific. His books in English include Oceanic Encounters, which he co-edited with Margaret Jolly and Darrell Tyron, and “First Contacts” in Polynesia.

Index

Aboriginal peoples. See Indigenous peoples Afghanistan, 25, 28 Africa, 123–4, 229 African Genesis (Ardrey, 1962), 11 Ahutoru, 144–5 Alaska, 24, 34, 182–202 Alaska National Guard, 191 Alaska State Department of History and Archaeology, 199 Alaska State Department of Transportation (DOT), 182, 185, 190–1, 199, 201–2 alcoholism, 159, 161, 168 Alexie, Eddie, 188 Almeida, Eulalia, 179n5 Amazon (state), 164 Amazon River, 155 American Anthropological Association, 9 Amsterdam, 206 A Mystificação Salexiana (Bandeira, 1923), 167 Anahulu (Sahlins, 1992), 4, 10, 21, 178–9, 242

Anatolia, 95 Anchorage, 184, 200 Anell, Bengt, 247 animals: domestication of, 93, 95, 97, 100, 103–4, 106, 111; hunting of, 103, 111, 184, 188, 196–7; killing of, 103–7 Aotearoa. See New Zealand A Palavra Viva de Deus (Conceição), 169 Aparecida, Our Lady of, 156–64, 171, 179n2 Apologies to Thucydides (Sahlins, 2004), 25, 27–9, 42 Apotheosis of Captain Cook, The (Obeyesekere, 1992), 21–3, 243 Appadurai, Arjun, 205 Arapasso people, 156 Arawak language, 172 archaeology, 38, 93–4, 100–1, 111–12 Ardrey, Robert, 11 Arens, William, 5 art, 98–101, 261

294 Index

Asad, Talal, 94, 114 Athens, 27, 51, 228 Australia, 14, 119, 238, 241, 243, 254–5 Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, 241 Aztecs, 16, 22 Baker, Thomas, 118 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 205 Bandeira, Alípio, 167 Baniwa language, 157 Baniwa people, 168, 172, 177 Banks, Sir Joseph, 149n4, 253–4 Baptists, 168 Barasana people, 179n7 Barcelos, 162, 169, 171, 176 Barrère, Dorothy, 19 Barthes, Roland, 247 Batavia, 254 Bateson, Gregory, 37, 50 Bau, 26–7, 51, 116 Bayrou, François, 231 Beaglehole, J.C., 242 Beirut, 59 Belém do Pará, 166 Beloff, Max, Baron, 239 Belting, Hans, 101 Benedict, Ruth, 6–7 Berkhofer, Robert F., 247 Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, 14 Best, Elsdon, 248 Bethel, 185 Bilderberg Group, 233 Blair, Tony, 208 Bligh, William (Captain), 127, 133, 253 Bloch, Marc, 247 Boas, Franz, 6–7, 13, 18 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 247 Bororo people, 180n11 Bosco, John, Saint, 180n9 Botany Bay, 255

Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 35, 136, 138, 140–1, 148, 150nn7,11 Bourdieu, Pierre, 18, 20, 110 Bouyeri, Mohammed, 215, 220 Brandeis, Eugen, 82–3 Braudel, Fernand, 18 Braund and Associates, 190 Brazil, 33, 152–81. See also Rio Negro Brewster, A.B., 113–32 British Empire, 114, 131–2n1, 132n2 Brown, George, 70–1, 137 Buck, Peter H., 247 Burrows, Edwin G., 247 Buruma, Ian, 206, 212–13, 216–17, 219 Bush, George W., 234 Butler, Judith, 204 Cagnari, Friar, 166 Cakobau, King of Fiji, 116, 120, 129 Calista Elders Council, 185 cannibalism, 16, 22, 180n17 capitalism, 23–4, 114, 207, 218 Carabixi, 164 Carew, Walter, 123, 129 Carruthers, R.H., 84–5 Caruru, 177 Cassiquiare River, 162 Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de, 28, 172 Çatalhöyük, 38, 95–104, 109 Cauvin, Jacques, 98, 101–2 Certeau, Michel de, 247 Chagnon, Napoleon, 30 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 247 Chambers, William, 84–5 Chanar, Brentina, 186–7, 189–90 Chanar, Cyril, 187–8, 195 Charlie, James, 192–3 Chevalier, Sophie, 6 China, 23, 29, 30 Christian, F.W., 248 Christian, William A., Jr, 162

Index

Christian Democracy (Italy), 231 Christianity: in the Brazilian Amazon, 33, 152–81; counterappropriations of appropriations of, 173–5; in Fiji, 116, 123, 129; function of icons in, 101; and the humiliation model of cultural change, 55–9; in Samoa, 66–7, 75; the “world created full” in, 117–18 Christu, Venancio, 172–3, 177 Christu, Vicente, 172 Cicero, 123 cingssiiget, 186 Clark, Grahame, 93 Clifford, James, 5, 247 Clinton, Bill, 234 cognitive anthropology, 99, 108 Cohn, Bernard, 33, 114, 130, 131–2n1 Cold War, 219 Collingwood, R.G., 247 Colo East, 129 Colombia, 155, 167, 171, 178 colonialism: in Fiji, 123–4, 129; in Hawai‘i, 21; and humiliation model of cultural change, 55; and multiculturalism, 224–5, 227, 232; and the origins of anthropology, 91, 114; Roman and biblical imagery in discourse of, 131–2n1 Columbia University, 7, 9, 165, 238 Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead, 1928), 137 Conceiçao, Bento da, 163, 169–71 Confucius Institutes, 30 conjuncture, structure of the, 16–20, 42–3, 65, 87 Constantine I, Emperor of Rome, 99, 174 Cook, James (Captain): account of expedition, 136, 149n4, 150n7; as exogenous force of change, 26; in popular history, 242–3; portrait by John Webber, 252;

295

Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate over, 4, 21–3, 243; and Sahlins’s theory of theogamy, 135, 150n8; and the structure of the conjuncture, 17, 19–20; and Tupaia, 253–8 Coppet, Daniel de, 135 Coppi, Friar, 166 “Cosmologies of Capitalism” (Sahlins, 1989), 92 cosmopolitanism, 206, 209, 226, 228 Cruz, Erivaldo Almeida, 181n21 Cruz, Jacinto, 179n5 Cubate River, 155, 177 Culler, Jonathan D., 47 cultural anthropology, 15, 24–5, 91–2, 108 culturalism, 182, 198–9 culture: as an adaptive organization, 10, 182; as basis for anthropology, 38; and demography, 232; as epiphenomenon vs autonomous force, 7, 14–15; and ethnicity, 208, 210, 223; and ethnography, 31–2; and globalization, 23–4, 198–200; and human relationships, 241; and the individual, 14, 17, 26, 48–9, 51–4; models of change of, 41–2, 44, 48–56, 60–1; and power, 114; and psychology, 53; replacing class, 222–5; and semiotics, 108; sui generis account of, 16, 22; as underdetermined, 92–3, 100 Culture and Practical Reason (Sahlins, 1976), 14–15, 92, 240 Culture in Practice (Sahlins, 2000), 18 culturology, 7, 13 Cunha, Manuela Carneiro da, 32–4, 36 Danish People’s Party, 222 Davidson, James, 19 Deeb, Lara, 59–60

296 Index

democracy, 87, 90n43, 209, 221, 229, 231 Democratici di sinistra (Italy), 231 Democratic Party (US), 225, 233–4 Dening, Greg, 19, 36, 127 Denmark, 222, 231 Derrida, Jacques, 247 Desana people, 173, 178 Deutsche Handels- und Plantagen Gesellschaft der Südseeinseln zu Hamburg, 81–2 Diamond, Stanley, 7 Dias, Gonçalves, 165 diasporas, 37, 124, 205 Diderot, Denis, 35, 135, 150n7 “Discovery of the True Savage, The” (Sahlins, 1994), 244 “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” (Lévi-Strauss, 1958), 228 dreams, 161–2, 173, 179n7 dualism, diametric vs concentric, 228–9, 235 Dubost, Jean-François, 228 Duff, Roger, 247 Dukumoi, Mosese, 114, 116–17, 126–31 Dumézil, Georges, 241 Dumont, Louis, 3 Düring, Bleda, 98 Durkheim, Émile, 53 Durston, Alan, 173 Easter Island, 10, 15, 150n9, 258 École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 13, 135 economic anthropology, 3 Ecuador, 180n11 Ekholm-Friedman, Kajsa, 229 Elias, Norbert, 253 Ella, Samuel, 70, 73, 75 Emperaire, Laure, 153 English language, 195, 259 Eratosthenes, 255

“Esoteric Efflorescence in Easter Island” (Sahlins, 1955), 238 Espírito Santo, 162, 169 essentialism, 220 ethnography, 32, 204–5, 244 Europe and the People without History (Wolf, 1982), 20 European Union (EU), 236n3 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 247 Evolution and Culture (Sahlins, Service, and Harding, 1960), 12, 238 evolutionism, 8–9, 12, 16–17, 108, 233, 238 “Evolution: Specific and General” (Sahlins, 1960), 12 Fanon, Frantz, 240 Fenua‘enata, 258–9 Fesche, Charles-Félix-Pierre, 138, 141–6, 148 Fienup-Riordan, Ann, 34 Fiji, 113–32; “begging” in, 4; cession to Britain and colonization, 116, 128–9; introduction of firearms to, 26; political leadership in, 70, 115–16; Sahlins’s work on, 9–11, 27, 238 Fiji Civil Service, 120 Fiji Museum, 113 Fiji National Archives, 113, 120 Finley, Moses, 27 Finney, Ben, 258 FOIRN (Federação das Organizações Indígenas do Rio Negro), 175, 181n21 Ford Foundation, 8 formalism, 47 Forster, George, 245 Fortuyn, Pim, 205–7, 211–13, 216, 221, 235 Foucault, Michel, 28, 204, 247 Fox News, 229

Index

France: intellectual debates of the 1960s, 13; political culture in, 222, 225–8, 231, 234; political elite in, 210 Frazer, James George, 241 Freeman, Derek, 134, 137 French Revolution, 221 Fried, Morton, 7 Friedman, Jonathan, 37 Front National, 222 Galvão, Eduardo, 165, 168 Geertz, Clifford, 3, 22, 247 Gell, Alfred, 101 gender: and alcohol abuse, 159; and immigration, 223; and interpretations of sexuality, 134, 151nn20–1; and Islam, 211, 214–15; and political structure, 134; and regional knowledge, 176–7; and traditional education, 191–2 Germany, 65, 80–3, 208, 222, 234 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 41 Giddens, Anthony, 208–9, 232 Gilman, Sander, 121 Gilson, Richard Phillip, 71–2, 75–6, 79, 82 Gitlin, Todd, 225 Gladwin, Thomas, 258 globalization: and cosmopolitanism, 226; and cultural difference, 198– 200; and “despondency theory,” 24; and post-colonial studies, 204; and radical centrism, 209, 232–3; and sovereigntism, 218 Godelier, Maurice, 13 Gogh, Theo van, 205–6, 213, 216, 220–1, 235 Golub, Alex, 135 González, Elián, 27, 51 Gordon, Sir Arthur, 119, 121, 124, 129

297

Graaf, Volkert van der, 212, 215, 220 Graeber, David, 28 Great Britain. See United Kingdom Great Transformation, The (Polanyi, 1957), 8 Green, Kaye, 258 Green, Roger, 258 Grimshaw, Anna, 28 Guadalupe, 170 Guarani people, 172 Gurr, Edwin, 84–5 Gurupá, 165 Gweagal people, 255 Habermas, Jürgen, 15 Haddon, A.C., 247 Handy, E.S. Craighill, 147, 247 Haraway, Donna, 28 Harding, Thomas, 11 Harris, Marvin, 5, 14, 16, 22 Hart, Keith, 28 Harvard University, 239 HAU (journal), 30 Hau‘ofa, Epeli, 4 Hawai‘i: compared with Samoa, 66–7; Obeyesekere’s account of, 22; re-enactment of epic voyages from, 258; Sahlins’s work on, 14, 21, 50, 92, 135, 178–9, 241–2, 244; system of political leadership, 71 head-hunters, 29 Henry, Joe, 185, 202 Henry, Teuira, 134 Heyerdahl, Thor, 245 Hill Tribes of Fiji , The (Joske/ Brewster, 1922), 33, 113–32 Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, 206, 214–15 historical anthropology: and colonialism, 130–1; experimentations with, 19; and post-colonialism, 24; and “real history,” 238–46; Sahlins’s

298 Index

projects of, 21, 114, 241–4; and structuralism, 17, 40–61 Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (Sahlins, 1981), 20, 242 History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 26–7, 51 HM Bark Endeavour, 243, 253–5, 257 HMS Bounty, 127, 252 HMS Dolphin (1751), 252–3 Hobbes, Thomas, 10, 16, 25, 27–8 Hocart, A.M., 241 Hodder, Ian, 93, 95, 97, 110 Holl, Augustin, 98 L’Homme (journal), 13 Hooper, David, 190–1 Hope, Charles (Captain), 67, 76 Hornell, James, 247 Hoskins, Janet, 105 Hough, Richard, 242 How “Natives” Think (Sahlins, 1995), 22, 243–4 Hugh-Jones, Stephen, 179n7 Human Terrain System, 28 humiliation model of cultural change, 55–6 hunter-gatherers, 9, 14 hunting, 103, 111, 188, 196–7 Iarauetê, 155–7, 166–7, 171, 174, 178 Içana River, 155, 167, 172 immigration: in association with Islam, 212; and ethnicization, 208, 210; and failures of selfintegration, 215; Fortuyn’s call for moratorium on, 207; and multiculturalism, 217, 223–4, 227, 231; Van Gogh’s films on, 214 India, 101, 118–19, 123–6 Indigenous peoples: agency, 4; appropriation of foreign

intangibles, 152–81; and cultural continuity, 182; and the English language, 259; and globalization, 200; and historiography, 243– 4; mediated encounters with, 253–4; and modernity, 34, 201, 239; and occidentalism, 218– 20; segregation of children of, 167; and “sentimental pessimism,” 24–5; and settler societies, 248; stage of social evolution, 14; and the structure of the conjuncture, 65; use of hallucinogen, 179n7 Instituto Socioambiental, 175 internationalism, 217–18 Inuit people, 182 Ipanoré Rapids, 153, 155–6 IPHAN (Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional), 155 Iraq, 25–6, 28 ircenrraat, 182–3, 185–90 Irwin, Geoffrey, 258 Islam, 59, 210–15 Islands of History (Sahlins, 1985): and Diderot’s “Supplement,” 35, 135; and microdynamics of a single encounter, 20–1, 242; and Sahlins’s models of cultural change, 26, 50, 62n3; and semiotics, 110; on the specificity of old Hawai‘i, 92; and the structure of the conjuncture, 17 Italy, 231, 234 Jacoby, Eric, 225 John, Jolene, 185, 191 John, Mark, 192–3 John, Martina, 185 John Paul (pope), 185, 192–3, 195, 200

Index

299

Latour, Bruno, 28 Lattimore, Owen, 8 Lays of Ancient Rome (Macaulay, 1842), 127, 130 Lebanon, 59 Le gouvernement invisible: Naissance d’une démocratie sans le peuple (Joffrin, 2001), 210 Les indigènes de la république (France), 227 Kadavu, 127–8 Les Temps Modernes (journal), 13 Kalukaat, 192 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: on cultural Kamakau, Samuel, 20 appropriation, 172; on culture Kame‘eleihiwa, Lilikala, 4, 21 and cultural difference, 14, 45, Kamiko, Uetsu, 172 130; influence, 3, 247; on political Kamiko, Venancio, 172–3, 177 ideology, 235; Sahlins and, 13, Kant, Immanuel, 246 15; on structuralism, 203; theory Kapferer, Bruce, 204 of diametric and concentric Kaplan, Martha, 33, 36 dualisms, 228–9 Karapanã people, 173 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 163 Kassiyuk Dance Festival, 185 Lewis, David, 258 Kealakekua, 242, 254 Lewis-Williams, David, 93 Keane, Webb, 38 liberalism, 216, 219, 226 Kelly, John, 31 King of the Cannibal Isles, The (Joske/ Lima, 173 Lincoln, Billy, 188–9 Brewster, 1937), 113, 118–21 Linnekin, Jocelyn, 6, 21, 32 kingship: in Samoa, 63–90; London Missionary Society (LMS), stranger-, 28–9, 228–9, 241 67, 72, 79 Kingship (Hocart, 1927), 241 Lowie, Robert Harry, 7 kinship, 9–10, 30, 107 Lucian of Samosata, 244 Kipling, Rudyard, 117–19, 123, Lukács, György, 15, 34 126–7 Kirch, Patrick, 4, 21, 178, 242, 258 Luomala, Katherine, 247 Kirchoff, Paul, 8 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 127, Kroeber, Alfred L., 7 130 Kuduí (prophet), 172 Malietoa Laupepa, 63, 76–85 Malietoa Taimalelagi, 73, 75 La faute aux élites (Juilliard, 1997), Malietoa Talavou, 76–80 210 Malietoa Tanumafili, 84–5 language, 45–7, 61n1, 109, 204, Malietoa Vai‘inupō (Tavita), 72–5, 241, 259 Lapérouse, Jean-François de Galaup, 80 comte de, 136–40, 146, 150n10 Malinowski, Bronisław, 15, 238 John XXIII (pope), 170 John Paul II (pope), 170 Jones, Sir William, 130, 131–2n1 Joske, Adolph Brewster, 113–32 Joske, Paul, 120 Journal of Pacific History, 19 Juilliard, Jacques, 223 Jumbo, Thomas, 193

300 Index

Manaus, 155, 171, 175, 177 Manono, 77 Māori language, 151n19 Māori people, 243, 254–5, 257 Marcus, George, 5 Maréchal, Joseph, 247 Margalit, Avishai, 212, 216, 219 Marquesas, 147, 150n9, 256 marriage: in the Amazon, 159, 161, 176; in Polynesia, 133, 135–40, 142–6, 148 Martini, André, 181n21 Marx, Karl, 4, 8, 15, 236, 240 Marxism, 13, 17, 24, 240 Mata‘afa Fagamanu, 76 Mata‘afa Iosefo, 78–81, 83–4 Matavai, 252–3 Maude, Harry, 247 Mauritius, 124 McFate, Montgomery, 5 McGregor, Davianna, 21 Mead, Margaret, 6–7, 134, 137, 147, 151n20 Meggitt, Mervyn, 9 Melanesia, 11 Melbourne, 119–20, 238 Melbourne University, 239 Melkert, Ad, 212 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 130 Merrill, E.D., 247 Meskell, Lynn, 100 Mintz, Sydney, 7 Mithen, Steven J., 102 Moala, 9–10 Moala (Sahlins, 1962), 10, 21, 135, 238 modernism, 208, 216, 221–3 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 7 Morrison, James, 134 Moses, Charlie, 194 Moses, Phillip, 194 Moses, Theresa, 198 Mouvement démocrate (France), 231

Mraz, Jacqueline, 23 Muller, Sophie, 167, 172 Mulligan, James H., 75 multiculturalism: as an elite ideology, 208–9, 211; and colonialism, 226, 232; emergence of, 219; and the left, 217, 223– 5; and liberalism, 216; and occidentalism, 221 Mulvaney, John, 247 Murdock, George, 13 Murphy, Robert, 7 Muslim Brotherhood, 214 myth, 235 Nadarivatu, 118 Nakamura, Carolyn, 100 Nakauvadra Mountain Range, 116 Nanterre University, 13 Nassau-Siegen, Charles Henri Nicolas Otton, prince de, 140–1, 145 National Academy of Sciences, 30 nationalism, 200, 207, 221, 225–7, 233 nation-states, 205, 220–1, 225, 227–8 Navaho sand paintings, 101, 109 Navosavakadua, 114, 116–17, 126–31 Nazaré, 155, 177 Nelson, Edward, 187 Nelson Island, 182–202 neo-conservatism, 229 neo-liberalism, 204, 208, 211, 226 Neolithic period, 98, 103 Netherlands: political culture, 205, 209, 211–15, 218, 226–7, 231; recent history, 207–8 Neue Mitte (Germany), 208, 222 Newell, J.E., 82, 84 New Labour (UK), 208 New Public Management (NPM), 209, 222

Index

301

personhood, 186–90, 195, 197 Piero, della Francesca, 180n19 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 231–2 Pira-Tapuia people, 156, 173, 177 Pius X (pope), 166 Polanyi, Karl, 8, 10 Polynesia: contact with Western powers, 65; as laboratory of cultural evolution, 8; origins of people in, 247, 257–60; political leadership in, 11, 67; sexuality in, 133–51. See also Fiji; Hawai‘i; New Zealand; Samoa; Tahiti Obeyesekere, Gananath, 4, 21–3, Polynesia Company, 120 35, 150n8, 243 “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man, occidentalism, 37, 207, 212, 215– Chief” (Sahlins, 1963), 11–12, 14, 21, 226 Occidentalism (Buruma and Margalit, 240 Portugal, 180n12 2004), 216, 219 Occupy Wall Street movement, 234 Portuguese language, 153, 157, 167, 177, 180n12 Oliver, Doug, 247 post-colonialism, 21–2, 24–5, 204, Ong, Walter J., 249 Oraison, Henri de Fulque d’, 140–1 220, 225 postmodernism, 23, 25, 34, 246 orientalism, 219–20 post-structuralism, 24 “Original Affluent Society, The” (Sahlins, 1968), 13–14, 91–2, 152 power functionalism, 61 practice theory, 4, 23 Orinoco River, 173 Prickly Paradigm Press, 28 orixá worship, 181n22 primatology, 9 Ortner, Sherry, 4, 18, 20, 23 Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Ottoman Empire, 221 Economies (Polanyi, 1968), 8 “Our Sea of Islands” (Hau‘ofa, Pritchard, William T., 140 1993), 4 Prodi, Romano, 231 Protestantism, 160, 167–8, 178, 207 Pacific History Association, 241 psychoanalysis, 18 Papua New Guinea, 11, 24, 56 Puck of Pook’s Hill (Kipling, 1906), Pará, 158–9, 165 118 Paraíba River, 179n2 Pulepule, 79 Parkinson, Sydney, 254 Purea, 252–3 Partito Democratico (Italy), 231 Pea Tavini, 80 Qalulleq River, 194 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 95, 109 Qasginguaq, 184, 187, 190–5, Pentecostalism, 167 199–200 performance art, 260–1 qasgit, 191–2 Pernambuco, 165 New Zealand: anthropology in, 243, 256–7; early encounters in, 150n9; Kipling on, 118; in re-enacted voyages, 258–9; Tupaia’s visit to, 254–5, 257 Nheengatu lingua franca, 157, 177, 180n12 Nightmute, 184, 190–1, 193–7 non-human persons, 186–90, 195, 197 Nunakauyak Traditional Council, 190, 199

302 Index

Qing Empire, 23 Querari, 155, 178 qununit, 186 Race, Language, and Culture (Boas, 1982), 18 racism, 210–14, 218, 223–4, 227 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 15 radicalism, 209 Rahner, Karl, 247 Ra‘iātea, 249, 252, 254, 258 Rapa Nui, 10, 15, 150n9, 258 Rarotonga, 67 Redfield, James, 27 Reginaldo, 155–7, 159, 171, 176, 178 religion: archaeological artifacts as evidence of, 96, 98–103; and occidentalism, 220, 223; orixáworship, 181n22; and political ideology, 235; as principle of constituted realities, 94; and structuralism, 108. See also Christianity; Islam; ritual; Roman Catholicism Republican Party (US), 229, 233–4 Rewa, 26–7, 51, 116 Rewards and Fairies (Kipling, 1910), 118 Ricoeur, Paul, 204 Rio Negro: appropriation of religious symbols in, 178; Carmelite order in, 158–9, 164– 5; course, 155; in extractive economy, 180n8; Indigenous people of the Middle, 161; Indigenous people of the Upper, 157, 161, 168, 171, 179n7; map, 154; Salesian order in, 167 ritual: and ambivalence, 229; and art, 99; and group status, 57–8; and materiality, 104; missionaries’

attitudes to, 167, 175, 178; organizational basis, 165, 181n22; and taboo, 146; vs catharsis, 259. See also religion Robbins, Joel, 38–9 Roman Catholicism: Carmelites, 164–5; Franciscans, 165–6; Indigenous appropriations of, 33, 153–81; Jesuits, 153, 157, 165, 172, 177, 180n12; lay brotherhoods, 165–6, 168; official vs popular, 175–6; in Samoa, 79; Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), 156, 170, 178. See also Salesian order Roman Empire, 131–2n1 Rorty, Richard, 247 Rotterdam, 213 Rotuma, 127–8 Royal Anthropological Institute, 124 Rubin, Gayle, 4 Rudall, Nicholas, 27 Ryan, Michael, 117 Sahlins, Marshall: career, 9–16; debates with other scholars, 4–5, 21–3, 35, 150n8, 243; education, 6–9; and historical anthropology, 40–4, 61, 110– 11, 113–14, 236, 243–4; on Indigenous peoples and indigenization, 152, 200; influence, 3–6, 91–3, 152, 178– 9, 204, 238, 240; “method of uncontrolled comparison,” 205; models of cultural change, 50–6, 62n3, 182; political activism, 12, 30; on “powerism,” 61; on religion, 94, 175; theory of theogamy, 135, 149, 150n8; theory of the structure of the conjuncture, 16–20, 42–3, 65,

Index

87; understanding of culture, 61, 92, 99, 117, 131, 182, 198–9, 241–2; work on political culture, 235; work on the “stranger-king,” 28–9, 228, 241. See also individual publications Sahlins, Peter, 228 Said, Edward, 5 Salamasina, 71 Salesian order: in Ecuador, 180n11; founding, 180n9; in Iauaretê, 156; possession of Indigenous artifacts, 175; resistance against appropriation of Catholicism, 174; and Rio Negro Province, 166–8, 179n7; selection and instruction of catechists, 169 Salmond, Anne, 150n6 Samoa: kingship in, 32, 63–90; in re-enacted voyages, 258–9; sexuality in, 134–5, 137–40, 147– 8; terms for young, unmarried woman, 151n19 Samoa Times, 74, 78, 80 Santa Catarina (state), 169 Santa Isabel, 153, 155, 157, 168, 171, 176–7 São Gabriel da Cachoeira, 153, 157, 169, 177 São Paulo, 178 Sapir, Edward, 6 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 17, 34–5 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 45–7, 61n1, 241 Savage, Charley, 26 Savai‘i, 69, 77 Scammon Bay, 196 Scandinavia, 222 schismogenesis, 37, 50–1, 55, 211 science, 18, 34–5, 95, 203, 236, 255 Scientific American (journal), 11, 15 Scotland, 119, 122

303

Search for a Method (Sartre, 1963), 17, 34 Seligman, Charles Gabriel, 137 semiotics, 107–12 September 11th attacks, 25–6, 210, 212 Sewell, William H., Jr, 42, 48–9, 53, 62n2 sexuality, 133–51, 207, 211, 216, 221 Sharp, Andrew, 245, 256–8 Shuar people, 180n11 slavery, 228 Smith, Bernard, 247 Smith, Percy, 248 Snow, Philip, 120 social anthropology, 92, 99 Social Stratification in Polynesia (Sahlins, 1958), 8–9, 12, 238 Solf, Wilhelm, 85 Somalia, 214 sovereigntism, 211, 218–19, 221, 231 Soviet Union, 219 Sparta, 51, 228 SPI (Serviço de Proteção aos Indios), 167 Stair, John, 73 “Spirit of the Gift, The” (Sahlins, 1968), 13 Stanford University, 220 Steinberger, A.B., 79–80 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 89n10, 90n36 Steward, Julian, 7–8, 10 Stone Age Economics (Sahlins, 1972), 3, 13, 240 structuralism: and the assassinations of Fortuyn and Van Gogh, 221, 235–6; and free will, 205–6; and Marxism, 13; and materialist semiotics, 108; and the notion

304 Index

Trask, Haunani-Kay, 20 Tribesmen (Sahlins, 1968), 19, 24, 36 Trilateral Commission, 233 Trinidad, 124 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1958), 45 Tuimaleali‘ifano Sualauvi, 77 Tuinaceva, Setariki, 120, 127 Tuka movement, 116, 118, 126–7, 130 Tukano language, 157, 172 Tukano people, 156, 177 Tulik, Camilius, 192–4, 197, 200 Tahiti: in re-enacted voyages, Tundra Drums (newspaper), 185 258; religion in, 249, 252, 255; Tunuí, 177 sexuality in, 135–8, 140–6, 149; Tununak, 184, 192, 195 Tupaia’s depictions of, 254 Tupaia, 249–58 Tapereira, 158, 163 Taputapuātea, 249, 252, 254, 258–60 Tupi language, 157 Tupi people, 172 Taracuá, 156 Tupua Tamasese, 79, 81–3, 85 Tariano people, 155–6, 166, 173, Turi River, 173 178 Turner, Peter, 66–7, 77, 137 Tawney, R.H., 247 Turner, Victor, 247 Taylor, Charles, 22 Tuyuka people, 173, 177–8 Taylor, Meadows, 124–5 Tylor, Edward, 238 Tcherkézoff, Serge, 35–6 Tea Party (US), 234 Uaupés River, 155–6, 165–6, 178 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 247 Ulurruk, 193 theogamy, 134–5, 149, 150n8 Umkumiut, 185, 192 Third Way, 208, 222, 230 UNESCO, 179n4 Thomas, Saint (apostle), 153 United Kingdom: anthropology in, Thomas, Nicholas, 4 238, 243; Kipling on history of, Thompson, Bobby, 27 118; and notions of “kingship,” Thompson, E.P., 247 241; political culture, 208, 222, Thucydides, 5, 27 226; and Samoa, 65, 75–6; and Thurston, Sir John Bates, 122 Tahiti, 252–3 Tilly, Charles, 37 United States: anthropology in, Tim, David, 192 238, 243; Civil War, 120; Elián Toksook Bay, 184, 190, 195–6 González case, 27, 51, 54; foreign Toksook Bay Tribal Council, 192 policy, 87; invasion of Afghanistan, Tonga, 66–7, 70, 115, 150n9, 259 25, 28; invasion of Iraq, 25, 28; Trade and Market in the Early Empire missionaries from, 167; political (Polanyi, 1957), 8 culture in, 225, 229, 233, 234; “Traffic in Women, The” (Rubin, protests against Vietnam War, 12, 1975), 4 of synchrony, 44–5; and realism, 203–4; Sahlins and, 15, 17, 29, 42 Submission (film), 214 substantivism, 10 Sumba, 100, 104–6 Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage Around the World (Diderot, 1796), 135 Suva, 120 Sweden, 208–10, 222, 224–8 Swedish Democrats, 222

Index

28; and Samoa, 65, 75–6; in Theo van Gogh’s film, 213 Upolu, 69, 76 Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, 13 University of Chicago, 9, 14 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 6, 9 Urapmin people, 56–9 Urubuquara, 156 Use and Abuse of Biology, The (Sahlins, 1976), 16 US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), 196, 202 Usugan, Frances, 187–9, 192 Uttereyuk, Mike, Sr, 196 Valeri, Valerio, 106 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 180n15 Vatukaloko people, 128, 129 Vaujuas, François René Charles Treton de, 146 Vayda, Andrew, 11 Venezuela, 167, 171 Veríssimo, José, 165–6 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 27 Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 63, 81–2 Vietnam War, 12, 28 Villiers, Alan, 242 Viti Levu, 113–16 Vollen, Barbara, 238 Wagley, Charles, 165 Waiting for Foucault, Still (Sahlins, 2002), 34 Walbiri drawings, 101 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 165–6 Wallis, Samuel (Captain), 252–3

305

Wanano people, 156, 178 Waters, J.H., 122 Watkins, Trevor, 102 Webber, John, 150n10, 252 Weber, Max, 37 welfare states, 207–9, 229, 231 West Africa, 181n20 Western Illusion of Human Nature, The (Sahlins, 2008), 10 Westin, Charles, 224 What Kinship Is – And Is Not (Sahlins, 2013), 30 White, Hayden, 247 White, Leslie: “culturology,” 7, 13; debunking of American beliefs, 10; determinism, 17, 38; evolutionism, 12; and Franz Boas, 7; and Marshall Sahlins, 6, 8–9; on religion, 94 White, Richard, 247 Whitehouse, Harvey, 99 Wilkes, Charles, 72 Williams, John, 72–3, 75, 149n4 Williamson, Arthur, 131n1 Williamson, Robert Wood, 137 Wittfogel, Karl, 8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 110, 247 Wolf, Eric, 3–4, 7, 9, 20, 114 World Economic Forum, 233 Wretched of the Earth (Fanon, 1965), 240 Wright, Robin, 180n16 xenophobia, 210, 218, 225, 228 Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, 196 Yup’ik language, 184, 191, 195 Yup’ik people, 184–202

a p r ac t ic e o f an th ropology

Marshall Sahlins at Manny’s Cafeteria and Delicatessen, Chicago, 2007. Photograph by Alan Thomas.

A Practice Of Anthropology The Thought and Influence of Marshall Sahlins

E d it ed By

Al e x Gol ub Dani e l Rosenblatt John D. Kelly

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2016 isbn isbn isbn isbn

978-0-7735-4688-2 (cloth) 978-0-7735-4689-9 (paper) 978-0-7735-9862-1 (ePDF) 978-0-7735-9863-8 (ePUB)

Legal deposit second quarter 2016 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication   A practice of anthropology : the thought and influence of Marshall Sahlins / edited by Alex Golub, Daniel Rosenblatt, John D. Kelly. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4688-2 (cloth). -- ISBN 978-0-7735-4689-9 (paperback).-ISBN 978-0-7735-9862-1 (ePDF). -- ISBN 978-0-7735-9863-8 (ePUB)   1. Sahlins, Marshall, 1930–. 2. Ethnology. 3. Social change. I. Rosenblatt, Daniel, editor II. Kelly, John D., editor III. Golub, Alex, editor IV. Sahlins, Marshall, 1930–, honouree GN320.P73 2016  306  C2016-900711-1 C2016-900712-X Typeset by New Leaf Publication Design in 10.5/13 Baskerville

Contents

Table and Figures  vii Preface Claude Lévi-Strauss ix Introduction: A Practice of Anthropology – The Work of Marshall Sahlins, So Far Alex Golub, Daniel Rosenblatt, and John D. Kelly  3 1 How Long Is a Longue Durée? Structure, Duration, and the Cultural Analysis of Cultural Change Joel Robbins 40 2 Monarchical Visions: Constructions of “Kingship” in Colonial Samoa Jocelyn Linnekin 63 3 Slow Time: Culture, Materiality, and the Knowability of the Neolithic Webb Keane 91 4 From Jew to Roman: Mr Joske, Mr Brewster, The Hill Tribes of Fiji, and the Hill Tribes of Fiji Martha Kaplan  113 5 Supplement to Marshall Sahlins’s Voyage Around the Islands of History (Tahiti 1768, Samoa 1787) Serge Tcherkézoff 133

vi Contents

6 Chassé-croisé: Or How Christianity Appropriated Indigenous Appropriation of Christianity on the Rio Negro Manuela Carneiro da Cunha  152 7 The Past Is Old, the Future Is Traditional: Ircenrraat, the DOT , and the Inventiveness of Tradition Ann Fienup-Riordan 182 8 The Kafka Connection: Structure, Lifeworld, and the Cunning of History Jonathan Friedman 203 9 Way-Finding: Respectfulness as a Performance Art Greg Dening 237 Bibliography  263 Contributors  291 Index 293

Tables and Figures

Tables

8.1 The shifting content of progressive ideology  217

Figures



2.1 Laupepa’s letter to Queen Victoria  64 2.2 Mata‘ata Iosefo  78 6.1 The Upper and Middle Rio Negro basin. Source : Instituto Socioambiental, 2008  154 7.1 Nelson Island place names. Drawn by Michael Knapp 183 7.2 Qasginguaq, June 2009. Photo by Ann Fienup-Riordan 184 8.1 External meets internal occidentalism  218 8.2 Components of the concentric shift in political culture 230 8.3 Diametric to concentric dualism  230 9.1a Tupaia’s chart. Drawn by Emily Brissenden, after 1.133, p. 130, in The Charts and Coastal Views of Captain Cook’s Voyages, vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768– 1771, ed. Andrew David (London: Hakluyt Society, 1988) 250 9.1b Identifiable islands on Tupaia’s chart. Drawn by Emily Brissenden 251

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Preface Claude Lévi-Strauss Translated by Marie Salaun

It is with great pleasure that I seize the opportunity to express my admiration and reiterate my old and faithful friendship to Marshall Sahlins. World-renowned as a master in Polynesian studies, Sahlins is also the object of a special gratefulness among his French colleagues. For many years, frequent visits to France have allowed him to become one of the best experts on their work. He has been a link between French and North American academics. He has helped them to mutually better understand each other. To illustrate Marshall Sahlins’s gift for synthesis, we shall remember how his reinterpretation of Polynesian historical facts has allowed him to overcome the often-misleading dichotomy between structure and event. Today’s anthropology is often tempted by postmodernism, constructivism, etc. In his writings as well as in his lectures, Sahlins has always known how to put anthropology back on the right track. He now stands as a sage among anthropologists, maybe the last one, which gives even more value to his recommendations.

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a p r ac t ic e o f an th ropology

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Introduction: The Work of Marshall Sahlins, So Far

Introduction A Practice of Anthropology – The Work of Marshall Sahlins, So Far Alex Golub, Daniel Rosenblatt, and John D. Kelly It is time to add Marshall Sahlins to the short list of great anthropologists, time to celebrate his contributions to the discipline, and time to discuss the far-reaching impact of his works. Sahlins has proved a more difficult (and diffident) subject for celebratory synthesis than many of his peers. The works of Eric Wolf (Abbink and Vermeulen 1992), Louis Dumont (Heesterman 1985), and others have received the attention they deserve, and the paeans for Clifford Geertz began even before his unfortunate passing in 2006 (Ortner 1999, Shweder and Good 2005). The most important anthropologist of the period after the Second World War, Claude Lévi-Strauss, was the subject of intense scholarly discussion for decades before his centenary in 2008. Yet the way in which discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s early works has drawn attention away from his later ones may have contributed to Sahlins’s oft-expressed reluctance to be memorialized before he was finished having his say. And so in this volume we come to praise – but not to bury – one of the major anthropologists of the post-war period, Marshall Sahlins. What are Sahlins’s contributions to anthropology? It is a harder question to answer than may at first appear. His 1972 book Stone Age Economics established much of the basic framework of contemporary economic anthropology, but when hundreds of scholars gathered at the American Anthropological Association meetings in 1997 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the volume, Sahlins quipped

4

A Practice of Anthropology

that they were still “stuck in the stone age.” In her famous article on theory in anthropology since the 1960s, Sherry Ortner (1984) cites Sahlins as one of the founders of “practice theory,” while also admitting that if she had centred her article on the emergence of “history” as a key term in anthropology rather than “practice,” Sahlins would still have been a central figure in her narrative. Economics, history, practice, evolution – Sahlins somehow seems to be at the centre of all of these. Beyond his well-known theoretical innovations, Sahlins has also had a quieter but no-less important influence on thinkers from many areas. In the acknowledgments to her article “The Traffic in Women,” pioneering feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin thanks Marshall Sahlins for “the revelation of anthropology” (1975: 157). In the Pacific, Sahlins’s writings have had an even wider influence: In the 1992 book Anahulu he brought two of the four subfields of anthropology together by collaborating with archaeologist Patrick Kirch to produce a joint history of the Anahulu river valley. In his groundbreaking text “Our Sea of Islands,” anthropologist and novelist Epeli Hau‘ofa credits Sahlins for “convincing me in the end that not all is lost and that the world of Oceania is quite bright despite appearances” (1993: 16). The great Hawaiian scholar Lilikala Kame‘eleihiwa wrote that she owed “a great debt to Marshall Sahlins for his intellectual inspiration and great kindness. An academic of the first order, he is excited by Hawaiians writing about their own history and in my bleakest hours gave me hope. I would never have thought of a doctorate had he not considered my work valuable” (1986: iii) – although she later decided she was “disappointed in Sahlins’s work, because I had mistakenly supposed him to be one of the few foreign academics who had aloha for us,” but he was really one of a “long line of foreign denigrators of Hawaiian society” (1995: 16). Kame‘eleihiwa is far from unique in finding much in Sahlins to disagree with. Indeed, the range and importance of Sahlins’s activities are reflected in the numerous controversies, disputes, and critical engagements in which he has been involved. Sahlins has argued famously with Gananath Obeyesekere over the death of James Cook; with Eric Wolf on the role of Indigenous agency in shaping colonial history; with Nicholas Thomas on the history and theoretical significance of Fijian “begging”; with Marx and other political economists on the determining power of “needs” in structuring social



Introduction: The Work of Marshall Sahlins, So Far

5

life; with socio-biologists on the role of biology in society; with Marvin Harris on the relationship between nutrition and culture; with Thucydides on the role of great men and rational interests in history; with William Arens on the existence of cannibalism; with Montgomery McFate on the appropriateness of anthropological participation in the Iraq War; with Edward Said, George Marcus, and James Clifford on the relationship between representation and power; and with any number of recent anthropologists on whether things like globalization and the emergence of transnational communities should mean the end of “culture” as a central theoretical term and preoccupation for anthropologists. Influential, yes; but certainly controversial as well. One might start trying to understand Sahlins’s thought by turning to that of his students. However, here again one would be disappointed. Despite (or because) having something to say on so many things, Sahlins has not founded a school or a movement. Those who have studied with him know that he considers imitation to be the opposite of flattery – he has too much respect for the particular to insist that his students be subsumed under him. Nevertheless, many of us, including (but hardly limited to) the editors and contributors to this book, have been profoundly influenced by his work. Since he continues to publish today, we expect that influence to continue to take new forms. Even so, we are happy to celebrate and reflect on his work thus far by bringing together these essays. An influential scholar with no organized school, an intellectual who has been both deeply oppositional to some paradigms and foundational in others – it is difficult to grasp the totality of Marshall Sahlins’s impact and the underlying connections of his important, powerful, and varied arguments. In order to do so, this introduction begins to synthesize Sahlins’s work by tracing some of his transformations across time and space. While we have no pretensions to venturing serious intellectual biography, we do hope to provide an account that contextualizes the chapters in this volume, and that will provide a coherent description of an author who has been cited, analyzed, attacked, addressed, lauded, contested, and defended, but rarely simply described. One common summation of Marshall Sahlins’s work is that “in the course of his intellectual career Sahlins has made a transition from materialism to idealism” (Linnekin 1987: 669). “Theoretical adversaries perceive Sahlins as a talented but mercurial-thinker,” wrote

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Linnekin, while “supporters counter that, unlike most scholars, Sahlins is not afraid to change his mind” (ibid.). We, on the other hand, will follow Chevalier in arguing that Sahlins’s thought has shown “extraordinary consistency over a long period” (2005). In what follows we hope to show that Sahlins’s shifts of position are due to his attempt to clarify the meaning and implications of the culture concept. Not a dogmatic structure, then, but a certain practice of anthropology can be discerned in Sahlins’s writings. Humanistic, logically rigorous, richly empirical, and generalizing, Sahlins’s practice of anthropology represents a vision of our discipline whose lessons could greatly benefit anthropology today. Such, at any rate, is our argument. In what follows we begin with a biographical overview of Sahlins’s thought before turning to the essays in this volume and demonstrating how they speak to themes in Sahlins’s thought, and to each other.

Biographical Overview of Marshall Sahlins’s Thought Early Years – From Chicago to Michigan to New York: 1930–1953 Marshall Sahlins grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in a middle-class neighbourhood on the west side of Chicago, the son of RussianJewish immigrants.1 Too young to participate in the Second World War, he attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he became a student and protegé of Leslie White. White was “one of those maverick intellectuals and politicians, like Thorstein Veblen, Charles Beard and Robert La Follette, who came out of the rural American heartland to off the pieties-and powers-that-be” (Sahlins 2008b). The power-that-was in anthropology during White’s early career was Franz Boas, who reinvented American anthropology at the beginning of the twentieth century. White was a student of Edward Sapir, but hardly considered himself a Boasian. Boas favoured the close study of individual cases, something he inherited from the bourgeois German Romantic tradition (Bunzl 1996), while White was an Anglo-Protestant who sought to build a general science of social evolution. Of course, White had WASP contemporaries such as Mead and Benedict who were also interested in moving beyond particularism, but they came from



Introduction: The Work of Marshall Sahlins, So Far

7

affluent East Coast backgrounds. White, in contrast, grew up on the farm and was committed to a populist radical socialism. Mead and Benedict saw their work as building on Boas’s legacy, while White saw his recuperating a tradition that started with Lewis Henry Morgan. Sometimes things got personal: White referred to Boas’s prose style as “corny” in no less a venue than the American Journal of Sociology (1947: 372), while Lowie (1960) referred to White’s work as “a farrago of immature metaphysical notions” (411), shaped by “the obsessive power of fanaticism [which] unconsciously warps one’s vision” (413). As White’s student, then, Sahlins learned about Boasian anthropology in order to repudiate it. In its place, White built a generalizing science of “culturology,” which according to Sahlins, “somehow accommodated the irreconcilable combination of a positivist materialism and a foundationalist symbolism” (Sahlins 2000c: 11). Early on, then, Sahlins was introduced to a problematic that would shape his thinking: how could culture be both an epiphenomenon of deeper economic structure and an autonomous force that determined social life and profoundly shaped human action? It was a question he would spend much of his career attempting to answer. Sahlins received a bachelor of arts degree and a master of arts degree in anthropology at Michigan under White, and in 1952 he went to Columbia to study for a doctorate. Although Boas founded the Department of Anthropology there, by 1952 Boasians such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead had been marginalized by the university’s administration and a series of imported department chairs. The most important for our purposes here was Julian Steward, who chaired the department from 1946 to 1952 (Manners 1996: 329). A student of Kroeber and Lowie, Steward combined natural history with Boasian anthropology to study how culture adapted to the environment. Although he had departed for the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign by the time Sahlins arrived at Columbia, Steward left behind him a large cohort of students including Eric Wolf, Sydney Mintz, Robert Murphy, Stanley Diamond, and Morton Fried. Many of these men were later hired into the department. Sahlins found an environment at Columbia, then, that shared strong affinities with White’s culturology. Fried served as the chair of Sahlins’s dissertation committee. While there was diversity within this group, there were important similarities, as well. They were “all some shade of red” (Wolf in Friedman 1987: 109) and read

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Steward’s cultural ecology – influenced more by the work of field naturalists and geologists than Marx – through a leftist lens. They also read leftists such as Owen Lattimore and Karl Wittfogel (by then a reactionary right-winger), whose materialist and generalizing approaches extended Marxism to the study of Asian and Middle Eastern societies. Comparative and intellectually adventuresome, their leftist approach dealt with the nitty-gritty of political economy. A second major influence on Marshall Sahlins at Columbia was the historian Karl Polanyi (Harvey et al. 2007, Congdon 1991, Levitt 2006). Born in 1886, Polanyi was a member of Hungary’s bourgeoisie whose generation sought spiritual renewal and intellectual revival in the face of a stifling national culture of Christian patriotism. He fled Hungary after the communist revolution there in 1919, eventually ending up in North America where he wrote his masterpiece, The Great Transformation (1957). This book demonstrated that the emergence of market-based societies in modern Europe was historically contingent and not inevitable. In 1952 Polanyi used Ford Foundation money to create a seminar on economic history that eventually resulted in the collected volume Trade and Market in the Early Empire (1957). The seminar examined the historical origins of the market by examining trade across time and space, and Polanyi’s critique of the “market mentality” (best seen in Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economies, a collection of his essays published in 1968) would provide much of the intellectual foundation of Sahlins’s later critique of political economy in both its Smithian and Marxian forms. Sahlins’s 1954 dissertation, Social Stratification in Polynesia (published in 1958), synthesized White’s evolutionary theory, Steward’s cultural ecology, and Polanyi’s substantivist economics. He argued that Polynesia provided a natural laboratory to test theories of cultural evolution because the culture of Polynesian voyagers was an independent variable while the environment on which they settled varied from island to island. Sahlins concluded that “social structure was functionally adjusted to the technological exploitation of the environment” (1958: ix). Taking his lead from a popular (but at the time unpublished) article by Paul Kirchoff (1955), Sahlins argued that the “conical clans” Kirchoff described – which appeared in Polynesia in the form of chiefly lineages – were a transitional stage between egalitarian societies and more stratified ones. With the publication of his dissertation, Marshall Sahlins established himself as a figure in the new, generalizing approaches to evolution, economics, and politics that were rapidly becoming central to the discipline.



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Social Stratification has several features that became characteristically Sahlins: It was focused on the Pacific, which he would study for the rest of his career. Topically, it was focused on kinship and politics – or, rather, the point at which one turned into the other – and their relationship to economics. This was also the first of the many comparative studies that Sahlins would make over the years. Economics and Evolution: 1953–1969 Like the work of many students in the 1950s, Sahlins’s dissertation was based on library research. Shortly after defending Social Stratification, he undertook his first field-based project: a study of “culture and nature” on the island of Moala in Fiji, which was the beginning a lifelong connection with that country. On his return to the United States from Fiji in 1956 he was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan and served there in Leslie White’s department, where he remained until 1972 when he moved to the University of Chicago. In the lates 1960s, Sahlins spent two crucial years in Paris. This was the period in which Sahlins’s early thought matured. Michigan was flourishing in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The university had handled the post-war influx of students and money much more successfully than had Columbia (Hollinger 1998), and retirements and growth had led to the hiring of young and ambitious professors such as Mervyn Meggitt and Eric Wolf. Evolution was growing in popularity nationally. Leslie White, once a voice crying in the wilderness, was even elected to the presidency of the American Anthropological Association in 1964. Evolution and adaptation had become mainstream. Marshall Sahlins quickly became central to much of this work, publishing on a wide variety of topics, including primate behaviour – in “Social Life of Monkeys, Apes, and Primitive Man” (1959). As a four-field anthropologist interested in evolution, it makes sense that Sahlins would attempt to resolve “the problem of distinguishing humanity from other primates” (Sahlins 2009a). Much as he had synthesized the literature on Polynesia, Sahlins now worked through the literature on primate behaviour and hunter-gatherers. In “The Origin of Society” (1960c) he argued that “comparison of primate sociology with the findings of anthropological research immediately suggests a startling conclusion: The way people act, and probably have always acted, is not the expression of inherent human nature … Human social life is culturally, not biologically,

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determined” (77). Culturally, not biologically determined: Here we see clearly Sahlins’s indebtedness to Polanyi and White and their debunking of American beliefs in the naturalness of individualism and the market. Here we see clearly that the theme of the cultural determination of behaviour runs through Sahlins’s career in both his “materialist” and “idealist” phases. The question at issue was what causes culture itself. This article also sees Sahlins arguing that Hobbes’s “famous fantasy of a war of ‘all against all’ in the natural state could not be further from the truth” (1960c: 82). Rather, he argued that it is non-human primates who could be said to exhibit Hobbes’s war of all against all. Human behaviour, in contrast, is organized by culture. It was the beginning of an opposition to Hobbes that would characterize Sahlins’s career. Indeed, this is the same critique of Hobbes that we find in The Western Illusion of Human Nature (2008d), a half-century later. Better known from this period is Sahlins’s work on “substantivism”: the idea, originating from Polanyi, that economic processes are embedded in kinship and political systems. Although he did produce a few papers in the Whitean mode explaining the ecological origins of cultural practices such as Easter Island moai, in “Esoteric Efflorescence in Easter Island” (1955), and the segmentary lineage system (Sahlins 1961), the bulk of Sahlins’s work in this period argued for the irrevocably cultural nature of the structure of kinship systems and distributive mechanisms. His focus at this time was thus not the adaptation of culture to the environment, but rather the variety of mechanisms through which harmony, rather than a Hobbesian war of all against all, came to be characteristic of human social life. This can be seen clearly in Moala (1962a), the ethnography that came out of Sahlins’s Fijian fieldwork. Moala, along with Anahulu (co-authored with Patrick Kirch), are the longest pieces that Sahlins has written. Moreover, Moala is the only ethnography based on “traditional” immersive long-term fieldwork – at least to date. Sahlins uses Steward’s concept of “levels of sociocultural integration” to organize his discussion of life on the island of Moala from the household level to Moala’s articulation with Fiji as a whole. While the volume is (as its dust jacket says) “frankly evolutionary,” its focus is on kinship and social structure – particularly the kindred. Culture is seen as an “adaptive organization,” but the articulation between



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culture and the environment is not the main topic of Moala. Unlike the work done by ecological anthropologists such as his classmate Andrew Vayda, Sahlins spends little time dealing with the flora and fauna of the island, energetics, or agricultural production. Rather, Moala’s key innovation is a refusal to “compartmentaliz[e] the ethnographic data under the usual categorical rubrics: ‘technology,’ ‘economics,’ ‘kinship,’ ‘political organization,’ ‘law,’ ‘ritual,’ and so forth” (1962a: 4). Instead the goal is to see what these things look like when they are not “disembedded” (Polanyi’s term) from the kinship system as they are in “civilized” societies. We should not, then, overemphasize the evolutionary and adaptive dimensions of Sahlins’s early work. Despite being written in his most “evolutionary” moment, Sahlins’s Fijian ethnography is more concerned with what happens to food once it gets into a culture system rather than with how it got there. Indeed, much of his work during this period focused on kinship, for example, his “Remarks on Social Structure in Southeast Asia” (1963a). Fiji sits right on the divide between the culture areas of Polynesia and Melanesia, and it may be that this fact, as well as the work of Sahlins’s colleague Thomas Harding in Papua New Guinea, led Sahlins to publish one of his best-known articles, “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief” (1963b). Here Sahlins again summarizes the literature on political organization in Polynesia and Melanesia in order to derive two ideal types of political leadership – the Melanesian “big-man” and the Polynesian “chief.” It is typically encyclopedic and synthetic work, but it marked a shift in Sahlins’s authorial voice: humorous, polemic, practical, and elegant. This shift to a stillrigorous but more artfully written style can also be seen in his book reviews for Scientific American, especially that of Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis (1962b), and still more adventurous is “African Nemesis: An Off-Broadway Review,” (1964a) written in the form of a play. Stylistically, Sahlins was coming into his own. For someone building a natural science of society, “Poor Man, Rich Man” seemed remarkably willing to eschew scientism. In that piece, Sahlins famously employed a method of “uncontrolled comparison” – “reading the monographs and taking notes” (1963b: 285) – very different from that of the lab scientist. The scope of vision and ease of reading made Sahlins’s article one of the most influential in Pacific anthropology, eliciting dozens of papers and books that played off his title. In retrospect, Sahlins’s distinction

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between the Melanesian big-man and Polynesian chief has not withstood scholarly scrutiny (for a good overview, see Roscoe 2000), but Sahlins’s willingness to generalize moved the field forward – indeed, it is a sign of his influence that his findings spurred the creation of a body of work rigorous enough to question his conclusions. In this period Sahlins also cemented his reputation as a theorist of cultural evolution. Social Stratification’s reconciliation of White and Steward was incomplete. White’s evolutionism was rooted in Victorian notions of improvement and progress, while Steward’s was aligned to the evolutionary synthesis in contemporary biology, focused as it was on non-teleological adaptation to particular environments (Smocovitis 2012). How to reconcile Whitean evolutionas-progress with Steward’s evolution-as-adaptation? These were the issues that Sahlins approached in his essay “Evolution: Specific and General” (1960a) in the small, influential volume Evolution and Culture (Sahlins, Service, and Harding 1960) which exemplified the Michigan approach to evolution. Here, Sahlins argued that societies could be understood in terms of either their adaptation to a specific environment or the general level of complexity they had achieved. Additionally, Sahlins emphasized that all of these processes are historical, and none imply that “primitive” people lack moral worth. With this reconciliation, Sahlins laid claim to a leading role in the shaping of the new evolutionary anthropology. During his years in Michigan, Sahlins was also on the forefront of politics, another of his hallmarks. With Eric Wolf and others, Sahlins organized – indeed, invented – the “teach-in” as a method of protest against the Vietnam War. He wrote actively against academic collaboration with the military, and even visited Vietnam to write about the atrocities committed there (1966a, 1966c). These efforts reflected a deep commitment to morality and activism, which Sahlins maintains to this day. The peace movement also affected his thinking about social life. White’s insistence that human behaviour is culturally determined seemed increasingly far-fetched during this time of rapid social change. The question of human agency and its relation to social structure was quietly added to Sahlins’s intellectual project, to become increasingly central to his writings as time went on. By the mid-1960s, however, Sahlins was getting tired of Michigan. Developing intellectually was difficult while serving under his mentor White, the anti-war movement was becoming simultaneously radicalized and infiltrated by the FBI, and Sahlins increasingly felt he was doing more organizing and less anthropology. In 1966 he



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attended a conference on kinship organized by Maurice Godelier and George Murdock at Lévi-Strauss’s laboratoire in Paris and was well received. An invitation to visit France for a year soon followed and Sahlins accepted. Culture as a Sui Generis Force: 1969–1976 Sahlins liked France and his initial one-year appointment at the famous sixth section of the École des Hautes Études was extended; he spent an additional year as a faculty member at Nanterre. This time abroad gave Sahlins time to develop, especially as a prose stylist. More and more in his work, he would adopt abrupt changes of register, shifting from big-shouldered to soigné in the course of a paragraph. However, style was just the tip of the iceberg for Sahlins’s work during this important period. In truth, we should not overplay the differences between the United States and France. Sahlins left anti-war protests in the United States only to arrive in Paris at the start of the explosive protests of May 1968. France was in the midst of a period of exceedingly creative and productive turmoil. The intellectual debates of the time no doubt seemed familiar to Sahlins: Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, for instance, bore a family resemblance to White’s culturology. LéviStrauss resembled White in other ways, as well: inspired by but not beholden to Boas, focused on kinship, wide in vision but fond of ethnographic particularity, and, above all, not afraid to write well. What’s more, in Paris the reconciliation of Marxism and structuralism seemed an urgent project – the Gallic analogue, as it were, of Sahlins’s own attempt to reconcile the material and symbolic sides of White’s legacy. Some see Sahlins’s Parisian interlude as the point at which he was irrevocably transformed from a “materialist” to an “idealist,” but this is too simple. After all, it was in Paris that Sahlins developed the essays that would later become Stone Age Economics (1972). The apogee of his substantivist work, “The Original Affluent Society,” for instance, appeared first (in French) in Les Temps Modernes (1968b), and “The Spirit of The Gift” (also in French) appeared in L’Homme (1968c). Indeed, it was in this period that the long essay, carefully honed, became Sahlins’s favourite form. Many of the essays in Stone Age Economics were destined to become classics, and “The Original Affluent Society,” the first essay in that book, is perhaps the best-known piece Sahlins has written. It is

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classic Sahlins: the encyclopedic synthesis of existing research, a Polanyi-White opposition to Western illusions of human nature, and a refined, elegant style. But whereas “Poor Man, Rich Man” relegated most of its scholarly apparatus to long footnotes, here Sahlins delved deep to produce quantitative data, juxtaposed quotations from primary sources, and supplied a large bibliography to lend proof to his claim. His point was that hunter-gatherers have more leisure time because their cultures are not predicated on the premise of infinite need. In making it, Sahlins meant to invert images of primitive starvation and desperation, but he also made another point: a close analysis of the data reveal the truth, but that truth is obscured by the cultural assumptions of previous writers. It was the beginning of an approach that sought culture logic not only in the ethnographic material Sahlins examined, but in the motivations of his scholarly opponents. That Sahlins’s writings evoked other forms of received wisdom – on the ecological nobility of natural man, for instance, or that contemporary Indigenous populations are more or less relics of an earlier stage of social evolution – no doubt added to the piece’s appeal. The six years after his time in Paris and the publication of Culture and Practical Reason (1976b) marked several shifts in Sahlins’s career. The first was areal: In 1970 Sahlins began a major new research project in Hawai‘i, visiting Honolulu as a fellow at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, and thus adding a second field site at the other end of the Polynesian triangle from Fiji. This was also the time when Sahlins connected with historians of the Pacific in both Hawai‘i and Australia. Finally, it was during this time that Sahlins left Michigan. In 1972 he moved back to Chicago, his hometown, where he took up a position at the University of Chicago that he would hold for over a quarter century. These new influences invited Sahlins to think more thoroughly about the relation between culture, environment, economics, and history. His focus on the determination of human action by culture remained unchanged: culture determines action, not the appetitive desire or utilitarian calculation of individual actors. But what determines culture? Crude materialists such as Marvin Harris insisted that culture is an adaptation to the natural environment, while Lévi-Strauss argued that cultural structures are shaped by their own internal logics. White seemed to believe both things simultaneously. Which is it?



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An adequate answer, Sahlins felt, must “motivate” (as structuralists put it) or explain the particulars of ethnographic fact – another hallmark of his thought. In an interesting but little-read review of Lévi-Strauss’s work published in Scientific American before his time in Paris, Sahlins had submitted that Lévi-Strauss was wrong to argue that “empirically ascertained relations between relations and groups are illusory” (1966b: 132). Privileging invisible, ingeniously conceived structures did not satisfy “that incurable addiction to empirical explanation one sees in certain anthropologists” (133). In other words, Sahlins’s early quarrel with structuralism was that it drifted away from the evidence. After Paris, Sahlins felt structuralism provided exactly the sort of empirical explanation he sought – and provided it more thoroughly than evolutionary approaches. Here we see continuity in the criteria Sahlins uses to evaluate theories, as well as in the questions he asks. His changing answers reflect a continuity of thought, not a shift. Thus, in an early essay, “Esoteric Efflorescence in Easter Island” (1955), Sahlins attempted to explain the existence of moai (monumental stone heads found on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island), with reference to “cultural [i.e., social structural] and environmental factors,” but admitted that “without more specific information about the role of the statues in the entire culture than is available, the question of heads instead of bodies, or why human images rather than animal, cannot be definitively answered” (1046). From his post-Paris vantage point, Sahlins must have felt that materialism could only explain that something would be made, but not what. Sahlins’s Culture and Practical Reason (1976) decisively settled these questions for him. In a 1977 essay, Sahlins argued that the environment is “neither a specific determination nor a sufficient explanation” of culture (15). No compromise was logically consistent: if “practical reason” does not determine culture in toto (which it does not) then culture must be a sui generis force. Culture and Practical Reason remains Sahlins’s most explicitly “theoretical” work to date: the encyclopedic rigour that Sahlins brought to bear on earlier ethnographic studies was now used to address a variety of thinkers ranging from Habermas and Lukács to Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski. Above all, the book was an engagement with Marx: it was an attempt to assess whether historical materialism or cultural anthropology could better understand human societies. While many of his colleagues argued that one could be either a materialist or an idealist,

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Sahlins argued a well-developed theory of culture could transcend this opposition itself. This is Sahlins’s most explicitly “culturalist” work but its themes are ones that Sahlins had pursued for decades. Throughout this period Sahlins continued producing Polanyian critiques of naive views of human nature, such as The Use and Abuse of Biology (1976d), his devastating critique of sociobiology. By now Sahlins believed that a critique of Hobbes has to be generalized into a critique of economistic thought itself, including of narrowly Marxist anthropologists. This approach is exemplified by Sahlins’s review of Harris’s account of Aztec cannibalism in “Culture as Protein and Profit” (1978b), which is unflinching in its insistence that (as he would put it in a later piece) cannibalism is always “symbolic” even when it is “real”: whatever energetic role human cannibalism has played in the human diet, that role by itself is not sufficient to explain the elaborate cultural forms that have surrounded it. But if the evidence clearly demonstrated that cannibalism is not the result of dietetic needs, what motivated Harris’s belief that it is? Sahlins argued that the idea had cultural appeal: it fit Harris’s deep-seated utilitarianism. Thus, Sahlins claimed his model could explain not only Aztec cannibalism better than cultural materialism, but also it could explain the cultural origins of Harris’s own analysis. Sahlins’s emphasis on the ethnographic minutiae of cannibalism and his rigorous, close reading of Harris’s argument exemplify his more general claims about the nature of culture and the duties of a rigorous anthropology. The Structure of the Conjuncture: 1976–1985 By the mid-1970s Sahlins had taken the problematics he inherited from White, Polanyi, and others and arrived at a sui generis account of culture. Now at Chicago, he would spend the next decade examining the implications that this model of culture had for causation and explanation in anthropology. Earlier in his career, Sahlins relied on the “layer cake” models of causation popular with evolutionary anthropology: the environment on the bottom as the prime mover, social structure above it and adapted to it, and ideology or “culture” as the frosting on top. If, however, culture is a sui generis force, then this account of the relation between these orders of determination can no longer be accurate. So how are they related? Sahlins’s answer to this question, the “structure



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of the conjuncture,” received its first presentation in “The State of the Art in Social/Cultural Anthropology” (1977), and he continued to develop it until it received a full portrait in Islands of History (1985a). Throughout this period, he tied this new model to the ethnographically exemplary case of the death of Captain Cook (see, e.g., Sahlins 1982a), and to historical anthropology more broadly. This meant dealing with “the relation between individual action and the cultural order” (Sahlins 1982b: 35). White had a strongly deterministic account of human action and so did structuralism, which “seemed … to exclude individual action and worldly practice, except as they represented the projection or ‘execution’ of the system in place” (Sahlins 1981a: 3). Yet, one could not live through the massive social changes of the 1960s and 1970s without believing that human beings could change the world. How, then, to understand agency without dismissing culture? Sahlins’s solution draws on Sartre’s Search for a Method (1963). Sartre sought to reconcile an existentialist commitment to human freedom with the Marxist argument that human beings are determined by their relation to the means of production; Sahlins’s solution was to argue that human beings have the agency to pursue their own existential projects, but that those projects are always expressed in the medium of a particular, determined situation that forms the context for those projects. Sartre was searching for a method, while Sahlins had just purified an object – a culture concept sufficiently robust to escape from the “practical theories” that reduced culture to “the social realization of a gainful ratio of material benefits to cost” (Sahlins 1977: 15). In response to Sartre’s question, “Do we have today the means to constitute a structural, historical anthropology?” (1963: xxxiv), Sahlins’s answer was a firm “yes”: “le jour est arrivé” (Sahlins 1985a: 72). Just as Sartre argued that “man is characterized above all by his going beyond a situation, and by what he succeeds in making of what he has been made” (1963: 91), so Sahlins argued that “life in society is not an automatic genuflection before the superorganic being but a continuous rearrangement of its categories in the project of personal being” (1982b: 42). No projects without a cultural background, but no worldly execution of culture without specific projects. Like Sartre, Sahlins insisted that humans always have a uniqueness and ability to choose which is the result of their particularity as individuals (although unlike Sartre, Sahlins

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never used psychoanalysis to examine the formation of personality through history). Sahlins had French influences other than Sartre. Although Sahlins occasionally gestured to Bourdieu as an influence on his thought, which is something that authors such as Sherry Ortner (1984) have made much of, it was Fernand Braudel’s Annales school of history from which Sahlins drew many of his ideas. Braudel viewed history as acting at different speeds, ranging from the actions of kings to much slower, geographical time that produced the seas and mountains that Braudel believed have fundamentally shaped human history. Sahlins borrowed the Annales sense of history as a conjuncture of different temporal rhythms to replace a layer-cake model with an image of intersecting, multiply paced causal forces that combine in unpredictable ways. Yet, while Braudel’s focus on the longue durée “devalue[s] the unique event in favor of underlying recurrent structures” (Sahlins 1985a: 72), Sahlins’s version of history rose “from the abstract structure to the explication of the concrete event” (ibid.). Sahlins’s model of cultural action involves three moments: (1) instantiation, when general cultural structures realize themselves in particular situations whose very uniqueness offers a surfeit of reality that exceeds the category that subsumes them; (2) denouement, when history actually takes place in ways that may vary from the ideal structure; and (3) totalization, when the innovative use of structures in particular situations feeds back into the more general structures, altering them. The uniqueness of each event is due to the fact that it is a “structure of the conjuncture,” a nexus at which different orders of determination (cultural, meteorological, geographical) come together in ways that determine all of them, but which none totally determine. Further, as we shall see later, these moments of conjuncture create spaces of agency for different people in different ways. How ought one study these conjunctures? Boas, in Race, Language, and Culture (1982), famously advocated for “cosmography,” the idea that “the aim of science … is the investigation of phenomena themselves” rather than “the discovery of general laws” (641). Sahlins’s goal (he claimed in Culture in Practice) was a “cosmography of symbolic forms” (2000c: 31) – since cultural structures at any one point in time are the outcome of history, and their proper explanation is a particularizing, historical account of their transformations, a sort of Boasian culture history redux.



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As a result Sahlins turned to history, producing relatively few encyclopedic syntheses in this period. Mostly. In fact, his works during this period continue to make ideal-typical, generalizing distinctions between (for instance) prescriptive and performative societies, heroic versus narrative history, and the ideal type of the strangerkings in the Pacific. Although Sahlins claimed his empirical goal was now historical explanation, it seems generalizing synthesis was a hard thing for him to give up. Sahlins’s turn to particularity was enabled by the “discovery that peoples of the Pacific I had studied indeed had a history” (1985a: xviii). In Australia he found people such as James Davidson arguing in the new Journal of Pacific History (founded in 1966) that culture “contact has been two-sided. The reaction to it of non-European peoples has been in terms of the values and institutions of their own cultures … for a full understanding … the historian must analyze situations from both points of view” (Davidson 1966: 9–10). Here was a conjuncture to examine! And in Hawai‘i Sahlins worked with scholars like Dorothy Barrère (see Sahlins and Barrère 1973) who showed him the “archival abundance” (Sahlins 1985a: xviii) of the Pacific islands, and Greg Dening, who was experimenting with new forms of writing historical anthropology. The archival record – a record of colonialism – also helped Sahlins to resolve the issue of culture contact. In Moala Sahlins recognized that “intercultural contact” is “one of the two major selective forces that have shaped Moalan life,” arguing that “a society responds adaptively to cultural influences directed upon it from the outside, just as it responds to natural influences. Logically, there is no reason to exclude culture contact … from the study of cultural adaptation … no more than a biologist would ignore the effects of competitors when studying the adaptation of species” (Sahlins 1962a: 14). In his short textbook Tribesmen, Sahlins noted that an account of ecological adaptation should be complemented by “another, at least of equal length, on the relations of tribes to coexisting societies and the modifications in organization thus occasioned. Unfortunately, this has been a neglected branch of ecological research” (1968d: 44–5). A theory of the structure of the conjuncture, combined with rich archival material, now made an account of culture contact possible, and this is what Sahlins turned to next. The centrepiece for his new method was an analysis of the death of Captain Cook, an example he presented briefly in the mid-1970s (Sahlins 1975), and then

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refined in a French collection (1979), before developing it more fully in Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981a) and finally Islands of History (1985a). Sahlins was not the first person to tell Cook’s story – the Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau had done so one hundred and twenty years earlier (Silva 2004: 17–20). But the death of Cook provided a way to show that Sahlins’s new approach connected the diverse pieces of his argument: individual agency, the conditioning power of cultural structures, the ironies of culture contact, and the unpredictable nature of history and the structure of the conjuncture. According to Sahlins, Cook’s death was the result of a chance series of events that were rendered meaningful by the cultural contexts in which they occurred: Cook’s arrival in Hawai‘i during the makahiki season led some Hawaiians to see him as an incarnation of the deity Lono, but his return to the islands after experiencing a storm at sea violated Hawaiian expectations – as did his behaviour when he returned. The final irony of Cook’s death was his dual apotheosis: in both British and Hawaiian culture, he was considered more than merely human. Anahulu and Obeyesekere: 1985–1992 The period between 1985 and 1992 was largely one of consolidation for Sahlins. Islands of History was very favourably reviewed. In an extremely influential piece, Sherry Ortner (1984) put Sahlins (along with Bourdieu) centre stage as a definitive solution to the ongoing tension between structure and agency. Islands of History was also warmly received by Hawaiian scholars, such as HaunaniKay Trask, who wrote that Sahlins had written “a remarkable, indeed beautiful, book” that “deserves to be celebrated” (1985: 787). There were also criticisms. Some Marxists considered Sahlins a turncoat idealist and argued that Islands of History seemed devoid of analysis of power, political economy, and colonialism – the very things at the centre of, for instance, Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People without History, which was published around the same time. Others argued that Sahlins’s model did not allow for “endogenous” change and that, on his account, only in certain unusual cases of external forces would cultures transform. Despite – or perhaps because of – this attention, Sahlins once again became central to anthropological debates. Islands of History used the microdynamics of a single encounter to make a theoretical point. Yet the microdynamics of a single encounter



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were not really the same thing as a full-length historical study. Thus, in 1983 Sahlins began a large NSF-funded team project with Patrick Kirch, Jocelyn Linnekin, and others to produce a full-blown ethnography that exemplified his historical approach. The result, Anahulu, was published in 1992. What Moala was to Sahlins’s evolution-based Fiji research, Anahulu was to Hawai‘i and his project of historical anthropology. Taking the question of cultural contact beyond the moments of initial encounter, Anahulu attempted to chart the course of the Hawaiian engagement with the West, arguing that Hawaiians neither “resisted” nor “submitted” to colonialism. Rather, they interpreted Western imperialism in culturally specific ways and integrated them into their own cultural system with consequences that could not have been predicted simply by the nature of the forces from outside. The book, in two volumes, is extraordinarily detailed and comprehensive. Anahulu was a critical success, winning the 1998 Stanley Prize. But it has not been as widely read as Islands of History. For one thing, it is a specialist work on Hawaiian history, and non-specialists looking for a quick summary of Sahlins’s theoretical innovations were disappointed. The book was also not well received by the Hawaiian studies community. As a visiting professor at the Center for Pacific Island Studies, Sahlins had helped encourage and support Hawaiian scholars like Lilikala Kame‘elehiwa and Davianna McGregor, and others. Now, however, they found his portrayal of post-contact Hawai‘i offensive for the way it emphasizes the mobility of Hawaiians (rather than their rootedness in the land) and for its portrayal of Hawaiian nobility as greedy elites who exploited commoners during the sandalwood era. But the biggest impediment for Anahulu’s reception has undoubtedly been Gananath Obeyesekere’s 1992 book The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, whose criticism of Sahlins’s work on Cook drew attention away from Anahulu and back to Sahlins’s work in the 1980s. Others had taken issue with the historical details of Sahlins’s analysis of Hawaiian history (e.g., Bergendorff et al. 1988), but Obeyesekere’s volume was a kind of critique that Sahlins had not experienced before: monograph-length, and strongly worded, it came at a time when a rising tide of post-colonial scholarship was taking issue with the epistemological self-confidence of white, privileged academics. The result was the “Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate,” a scholarly exchange conducted largely by Obeyesekere and his reviewers. Sahlins’s single intervention of substance was

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his short book How “Natives” Think (1995); for an overview, see Borofsky (1997), and for a history from a kanaka maoli (indigenous Hawaiian) perspective, see Silva (2004).) Twenty years earlier, Sahlins had outflanked Harris by arguing that a sui generis notion of culture could explain not only Aztec cannibalism, but also Harris’s explanation of Aztec cannibalism. Now the tables were turned: Obeyesekere argued that Sahlins’s explanation of Cook’s death was a result of Sahlins’s own Western “mythmodels” that exoticized the Other. Although argued in the language of ethnohistorical minutiae, the debate was widely followed because it addressed broader disciplinary anxieties about ethics and epistemology. As Geertz noted at the time, “After one reads these two having at one another … whatever happened to Cook, and why, seems a good deal less important … than the questions they raise about how it is we are to go about making sense of the acts and emotions of distant peoples in remote times. What does ‘knowing’ about ‘others’ properly consist in? Is it possible? Is it good?” (1995: 4). In fact, the debate fit awkwardly into existing post-colonial frames. Charles Taylor (1994) has argued that the politics of recognition requires two moments, a “politics of universalism, emphasizing the equal dignity of all citizens” (37) and “a politics of difference … [which] recognize[s] the unique identity of this individual or group, their distinctness from everyone else” (38). In this period it was often the mainstream white academics advocating universalism, with insurgent post-colonial scholars attempting to “provincialize Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000) insisting on the parochial nature of the West’s purportedly universal standards. In fact, it was Obeyesekere who pursued a politics of universalism, emphasizing the coevalness of Hawaiians with “us” (whoever that pronoun denotes) and analyzing Hawaiian action as the expression of universal human nature. Sahlins, in contract, argued that in Obeyesekere’s account “distinctive patterns of belief and action get swallowed up in common Western senses of rationality. Their own scheme of things is resolved into a philosophy of empirical realism that pretends to be human and universal – or else, in other arguments distinctive of ‘natives’ by contrast to Western-colonial mythologists” (Sahlins in Borofsky 1997: 273). Ironically, in this debate it was the third world intellectual who advocated for an Enlightenment universalist position and Sahlins, the “old white man,” who insisted on a politics of radical difference.



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Ultimately, academic attention moved on. By the time Obeyesekere responded to Sahlins in the afterword to the second edition of Apotheosis, in 1997, anthropologists had grown weary of the debate and its often-heated tone. Although there was no final accounting, many felt that Sahlins had won, if only on points. Afterology, Despondency Theory, and the Anthropology of Modernity: 1992–2001 In retrospect, Ortner was wrong to see “practice theory” as the future of anthropology. As the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate showed, theory in the 1990s would instead be focused on crises of representation, ethics, and epistemology associated with the terms “postcolonialism,” “postmodernism,” and “‘post-structuralism” – a group of theories that Sahlins, following Mraz, labelled the “afterologies.” It is probably too simple to lump these diverse approaches under a single label, nonetheless, the label does convey Sahlins’s sense of profound dissatisfaction with these movements. From 1992 to 2001, Sahlins had moved from particularistic historical ethnography to a more general “anthropology of modernity” (for an overview of this, see Robbins 2005), which addresses issues of epistemology and power in the context of the globalizing world of the post–Cold War period. Was the rise of capitalism inevitable? Is cultural specificity disappearing? Can anthropologists speak authoritatively about these topics? In examining these questions – no, no, and yes were his answers – Sahlins sought to challenge the afterologists and continue his dialogue with Marxism. Sahlins’s ethnographic focus in this period expanded to include China. In a paper written during a 1988 visit to Beijing (1990a), Sahlins argued that the Qing Empire’s lack of interest in Western commodities was exemplary of the way that non-Western people could assimilate capitalism into their own cultural schemes, “making modernity the servant of custom, rather than its master” (80). In his Radcliffe-Brown lecture of 1988 Sahlins combined Chinese, Pacific, and Native North American material together to argue that differences in nineteenth-century global capitalism were in each case mediated by pre-existing cosmological cum political structures: ruling chiefs in Hawai‘i and the Northwest coast of America were interested in acquiring different things, for different purposes, and with different consequences (Sahlins 1989b). Global capitalism

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was always locally understood, and was itself transformed by its encounter with other cultural logics. This argument about globalization was meant to apply to the twentieth century as well as the nineteenth. In Tribesmen (1968) Sahlins argued that “modern civilization knows no borders: those curious peoples beyond the pale have been drawn into the main sphere in the course of Europe’s four-century planetary reconnaissance. Once discovered, they were rapidly colonized, baptized, and culturally traumatized … And now, having bit deep into native custom, civilization allows itself the luxury of an intellectual digestion … anthropology … becomes an inquest into the corpse of one society presided over by members of another” (1–2). By the 1990s Sahlins was criticizing this position, not advocating it. He labelled this belief “sentimental pessimism,” part of a broader “despondency theory” (a riff on the “dependency theory” of world system theory), which Sahlins believed was too pessimistic about the chances of Indigenous culture. He now drew on contemporary ethnographic data from Alaska, Papua New Guinea, and other places to demonstrate that, on the contrary, the global trend was toward the “indigenization of modernity”: local people were using the materials of globalization to become “more themselves than ever before.” “Culture,” Sahlins claimed, “is not a disappearing object” (2000b). This was both an empirical generalization and a theoretical riposte. In denouncing the omnipresent force of Western hegemony, Sahlins argued, afterologists implicitly endorsed colonial fantasies of power as real. Furthermore, as their goal shifted from analysis to moral judgment, the work of analyzing the details, Sahlins claimed, was being forgotten. Although he disagreed with dependency theory’s gloomy diagnosis for Indigenous people, Sahlins shared Marxists’ epistemological confidence – he was, in short, willing to speak truth to power. On the other hand, post-colonialism, he believed, “put the very possibility of a historical anthropology – maybe even the possibility of a comparative cultural anthropology – at issue” (Sahlins in Borofsky 1997: 272). Against “poststructuralist litanies about the contested and unstable character of cultural logics” Sahlins argued that “polyphony is not cacophony” (2002b: 27) and that there was “a noncontradictory way … of describing the contradictions, a system of and in the differences” (2000c: 488), since “in order for the categories to be contested at all, there must be a common system of intelligibility” (ibid.).



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Furthermore, Sahlins spent an increasing amount of time arguing that “ethnography has always known that cultures were never as bounded, self-contained, and self-sustaining as postmodernism pretends” (1999c: 411). Sahlins’s publications in this period argued not only for the vitality of local cultures, but that afterologists made a straw man of anthropology. In his own intellectual autobiography (see the introduction to Culture in Practice 2000c) and other works, he helped refresh the discipline’s memory of its past accomplishments and findings. In some senses, Sahlins was swimming against the current in these years. He argued for the value of traditional cultural anthropology and for the vitality of Indigenous people and their cultural projects. These things were not typically paired, since the sentimental pessimism of dependency theory relied on authoritative denouncement of the death of local cultures, and post-colonialism attempted to reclaim the agency of Indigenes by questioning the epistemological authority of first-world scholars. Power, Events, and Human Nature: 2001–2010 Although Sahlins had written for years about power, politics, and individual agency, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan gave these topics new urgency for him: what were the cultural origins of the realpolitik that drove US foreign policy? How could a single event like 9/11 have such incredible repercussions? How could the decisions of a US president have such power to shape the historical record? These were the issues Sahlins took up in this decade, often refracted through his Fijian material. As he dealt with issues of war, empire, and human nature, Sahlins drew on themes from his earlier work, often combining them in new ways with classical ethnographic material. Apologies to Thucydides (2004a) was his main book to come out during this period, but before discussing it let us first discuss its deeper roots in Sahlins’s thought. Marshall Sahlins had always opposed Western misconceptions of human nature, and so it is not surprising that he saw the influence of his bête noir, Hobbes, at work in post-9/11 America. “The American war policy is based upon a certain ethnocentric notion of human nature” (2009a), Sahlins wrote. In this period he returned to work begun in the mid-1990s on “the native anthropology of Western cosmology” in a series of essays designed to sketch out the culture history of the folk theories motivating America’s power

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politics (Sahlins 2005a, 2008d). Having described and defended the genealogy and adequacy of the culture concept, he now described the shape, form, and history of wrong-headed theories of human nature in Western thought. 9/11 was nothing if not an event, and after the turn of the millennium Sahlins returned to the role of events in shaping history. One of the challenges raised to Islands of History was that it had no account of endogenous sources of change. As early as 1991 Sahlins had responded with an important essay entitled “The Return of the Event, Again” which argues that cultural structures sometimes amplify the agency of individuals, who then became a source of novelty that transforms structures. Thus, although Cook was an exogenous force of change in Hawai‘i, whose influence was amplified by his place in Hawaiian and British cultural schemes, in the Fiji wars the chiefs of Bau and Rewa were endogenous sources of change whose agency was amplified by their chiefly status. Sahlins had used ethnography from this Fijian conflict several times before to discuss war and power (see, e.g., “War in the Fiji Islands” 1987), emphasizing the cultural mediation at the heart of even the most punitive force. His essay “The Discovery of the True Savage” (1994a), for instance, examines the story of Charley Savage, the Swedish man who introduced firearms to Fijian warfare. From the outside, Savage’s story appeared straightforward: his “advanced” technology gave tremendous power to its white owners as they colonized Indigenous areas of realpolitik. Sahlins, on the other hand, searched the historical record to discover the “true Savage” – a man whose political force is a result of the cosmopolitical order in Fiji, where chiefly politics are predominant. It was not his weapon, Sahlins argues, but the way it disrupted chiefly battles, that made Savage an important political player. Even the dominance of the colonizer is, in Sahlins’s account, underwritten and shaped by the Indigenous cultural system, and narratives of Western power remain fundamentally a Fijian story. Just as force is culturally mediated, so too is disorder. In publications throughout this period Sahlins compared the events of the Peloponnesian War with the situation in occupied Iraq. These “wars of all against all” were not the result of people stripped down to their basic human nature, but of culturally specific projects of domination of local people. “It takes a lot of culture,” Sahlins quipped, “to make a state of nature” (2011d: 27).



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In fact, Sahlins had long rubbed shoulders with classicists. In graduate school he attended Polanyi’s seminar with Moses Finley. Sahlins also knew Jean-Pierre Vernant and his school, who like Sahlins himself came from Marxist/leftist backgrounds but sought a humanistic structuralist-inflected approach to their material. And finally, at Chicago Sahlins knew scholars such as Nicholas Rudall and James Redfield. Sahlins had dabbled in classical material for some time although much of it remained unpublished (see, e.g., Sahlins 2011a – which was written decades before it was published). The highlight of this work was Sahlins’s 2004 Apologies to Thucydides (helpfully digested in Sahlins 2005e). This volume addresses issues of empire, power, realpolitik, and the amplification of individual agency by triangulating three ethnographic areas: nineteenthcentury Fiji, twentieth-century America, and fifth-century Athens. It is structured as an extended comparison of the Bau-Rewa conflict and the Peloponnesian War. Here, Sahlins moves beyond his old foil Hobbes to one of Hobbes’s decisive influences, Thucydides. Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War was the canonical Western account of political conflict, and Thucydides’s political realism was the forerunner to the versions of economics and political science that shaped American foreign policy. In Apologies Sahlins demonstrated that the paradigmatic Western account of political conflict does not make sense even of the case from which it generalizes: Thucydides did not understand the way culture shaped the Peloponnesian War, a conflict whose viciousness was shaped by Greek cultures of honour, pride, and thalassocracy – the system of “rule by sea” which Greece shared with the Fijian polity of Bau. Why, Sahlins asked, should we use Thucydidean realism in our contemporary social analysis if it could not make sense of Greece? In many ways, however, the most charming part of the book is its sparkling middle section, which discusses the structural amplification of agency in the case of Bobby Thompson’s home run that won baseball’s National League pennant in 1951, and the custody battle over Elián González. Each exemplifies one of two different patterns of amplification: one conjunctural, the other structural. Despite his call for a “cosmography of cultural forms” (2000c: 31), Sahlins still seemed to admit that “there is pleasure too, and some intellectual reward, in discovering the broad patterns” (1963b: 285). Apologies also returned to and enlarged this critique of afterology, now called “Leviathanology,” in order to show the genealogical link

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between Thucydides, Hobbes, and Leviathanology. As part of this he expanded his critique of afterology to include Foucault, whose focus on the ubiquity of power reminded Sahlins of Hobbes’s vision of life as a “war/of all against all” and whose notion of “discourse” seemed to him to posit a determination of social life so encompassing and powerful that it seemed to be Hobbes’s leviathan in postmodern guise. It was during this period that Sahlins, now an emeritus professor, made the move from author to editor when he became the executive publisher of Prickly Paradigm Press. The press – then called Prickly Pear – began in 1993 as a UK-based project of Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw, and had gone through several permutations (the British branch of this scholarly cactus is still alive and well). In 2002 Prickly Paradigm began producing pamphlets that continued Sahlins’s engaged, well-written, and essay-length polemics. Now, more than forty pamphlets later, the press has produced work on contemporary academic politics, as well as cutting-edge theoretical interventions by authors such as David Graeber, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Prickly Paradigm also became a forum for Sahlins to oppose anthropological collaboration with the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly forty years after the teach-ins against Vietnam, Sahlins now found himself arguing against Human Terrain System, the program conducting social science in aid of the occupation which an anthropologist dedicated to helping the military “aim better” (Jacobsen 2008). Sahlins helped support a variety of publications opposed to this sort of work, both in his pamphlet series (González 2009, Network of Concerned Anthropologists 2009, Jacobsen 2009) and more generally (Kelly et al. 2010). Life from Without: 2010– Recently Sahlins’s focus has swung back toward the general and, indeed, the human condition more broadly. In the last few years he has tried to substantiate the “modest claim” that “the elementary forms of kinship, politics and religion are all one” (2008c: 197) because they all involve gaining “life from without” (179). There are several interrelated pieces to this broad claim, and many of them deal with themes that Sahlins had long explored in his writings. The first is the phenomenon of the stranger-king: an



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exogenous ruler who usurps power from autochthons and becomes their leader. In the 1980s Sahlins demonstrated the presence of this ideal type in Polynesian and Indo-European cultures and suggested it had broad applicability to a number of societies. In making this claim that “the political appears here as an aspect of the cosmological” (1985a: 90) Sahlins was opposing “the quaint Western concept that domination is a spontaneous expression of the nature of society, and beyond that, of the nature of man” (75–6). Now, after this point had been amplified in Apologies to Thucydides, Sahlins returned to it, arguing that stranger-kingship was a political form of “global extent and historical range” (2008c: 178). This was so because the underlying dynamic of stranger-kingship is, Sahlins claims, a fundamental structure of the human condition: it involves the “transaction of vitality” from a “potent alterity” to one’s self (2008c: 177). Now Sahlins went on to claim that there are other forms of politics that feature the same dynamic, drawing increasingly not only from Polynesia and China, but the space between them: the wider sphere of “Austronesian” and southeast Asian cultures. Head-hunters, for instance, incorporated outside enemies in order to gain power. Indeed, even in cases of polities ruled by “cosmocraters” whose legitimacy is rooted in the divine orders, acquisition of objects from peripheral spaces is proof of sovereign potency: thus Chinese emperors used tribute from nomadic peoples as proof they enjoyed the Mandate of Heaven. Peripheral people, in turn, often used items from these centres to boost their own internal legitimacy. In contrast to the realpolitik of Thucydides and his successors, Sahlins now claims that only a “real-politics of the marvellous” (2010b: 118) can explain the particularities of actually existing political systems. Two things follow from this: first, that much of economic life could be understood as the search for objects that were valuable because they were remote or “other” (Sahlins 2010b). Additionally, it becomes clear that bounded notions of culture are inadequate to understanding societies, since much of what shaped them involved their interactions with one another. In the 1980s Sahlins demonstrated that structuralism was not ignorant of practice. In the 1990s he argued that anthropology had never considered culture to be “bounded.” Now, Sahlins showed that order was “intercultural” (2010b) and spread across the boundaries of polities and ethnic groups.

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At the root of this focus on alterity is, Sahlins claims, a basis in deeper structures of kinship. In his short book What Kinship Is – And Is Not (2013a) Sahlins argues that kinship is an experience of mutuality and intersubjective identification – an argument that is supported, he argues (2011c: 230–2), by recent work in evolutionary behaviouralism. The use of alterity in religious, economic, and political life is based on a deeper, more primary human experience of mutuality of being: the specieswide sense that kinsfolk “participate intrinsically in each other’s existence” (Sahlins 2013a: ix). Marshall Sahlins has shown no signs of slowing down politically. His two most recent areas of interest focus on the integrity of the academy. First, he took the unusual step of resigning from the National Academy of Science of the United States – one of the most prestigious institutions in American intellectual life – in February 2013 (see Sahlins 2013b). The resignation was a protest against the Academy’s role in furthering American imperialism, and also the election of Napoleon Chagnon to the academy. For Sahlins, Chagnon’s unethical fieldwork and socio-biological approach is a model of how not to conduct research, empirically flawed, and morally dubious. Sahlins has also been vocal in his opposition to the Confucius Institutes (Sahlins 2015b) increasingly present in the American academy. These institutes, funded by the Chinese government but hosted by American universities, are antithetical to academic values, Sahlins maintains, because they present a tendentious image of China and promote censorship and self-censorship similar to the government prohibitions on discussion of politically charged topics in Chinese universities. Amazingly, roughly two decades into his emeritus career, Sahlins is still fashion-forward in theoretical circles. He has been an important supporter of new trends in anthropological publishing and theory. HAU, the first major international peer-reviewed, open-access online journal in anthropology, draws heavily on Marshall Sahlins in its founding theoretical statement (da Col and Graeber 2011), and Sahlins contributed a piece (2011a) to the inaugural issue. HAU is just part of a more general rapprochement between American, British, and French academic traditions that Sahlins has helped support. Sahlins continues to connect English speakers to francophone thought, receiving the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2011 (Harms 2011). In 2014 “ontology” became the buzzword in American anthropological circles, partially because of the roundtable



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“The Ontological Turn in French Philosophical Anthropology” in which Sahlins participated (see Sahlins 2014a) and which John Kelly (a co-editor of this volume) helped organize. In this and in other smaller publications (e.g., Sahlins 2013c) Sahlins continues to influence the discipline of anthropology by promoting the work of others. In mentioning this influence, however, we should not leave the impression that Marshall Sahlins has stopped producing his own work. But having covered Sahlins’s career (so far), let us turn to the essays in this volume and examine how they take up some themes in Sahlins’s work.

Some Structures of the Longue durée , and Their Transformations At the beginning of this essay we claimed that Sahlins’s thought was coherent, even though he contributed to a diverse array of areas. Contra a common narrative that broke his career into an earlier material and a later idealist period, we have endeavoured to demonstrate that Marshall Sahlins has shown considerable intellectual continuity over the course of his career. We now turn to the final task of this introduction: to generalize about some of the structures of the longue durée of Sahlins’s practice of anthropology and to examine how the essays by our authors represent transformations of these structures. As we mentioned at the start of this introduction, Sahlins has never produced a school or clique – there is no “Sahlinsological” approach to anthropology. He has never tried to make himself hegemonic by flooding the job market with graduate students; he disdains imitators; and his rigorous, humanistic anthropology is not doctrinaire. Rather, Sahlins’s influence is that of the atelier – one can see his colleagues developing their own unique styles in the course of their time spent in his workshop. For these reasons, the essays gathered here do not have a program or agenda, but an esprit de corps. The individual chapters are variations on the themes in Sahlins’s work. One fundamental feature of Sahlins’s thought is his demand for ethnographic adequacy. Throughout his career, Sahlins has insisted that we recognize the “specificity and historicity of cultures” (2009a), the full particularity of human lives. Ethnographic facts – and

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they are facts, for Sahlins – are in and of themselves interesting to Sahlins, and he believes that we owe them our attention and the duty to describe them accurately. It is for this reason that he argues that anthropology must be a “cosmography of cultural forms,” a discipline in which “anthropologists rise from the abstract structure to the explication of the concrete event” (1985a: 72). We see this commitment to rich ethnography in nearly all of the chapters in this volume. This sentiment is perhaps best summed up by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha when she writes here that “our most lasting contribution as anthropologists might be – after all is said and done – data, fieldwork, and the stories they unveil. Just that.” In an era where anthropologists are on the lookout for the latest theoretical fad, Sahlins and his colleagues share a commitment to the value of ethnography for ethnography’s sake. A good example of this concern with the particular is Jocelyn Linnekin’s chapter. Her examination of conceptions of kingship in nineteenth-century Samoa reflects several themes in Sahlins’s work: the historical anthropology of the Pacific, the cultural nature of power, and the mediation of colonial power by endogenous cultural structures. The history of imperial intrusion into Samoa, she argues, is one of constant misrecognition of Samoan politico-religious dynamics. Linnekin demonstrates how the notion of a single Samoan “kingship” developed as the result of a conjuncture of culture systems in the course of Samoa’s entanglement with the world system. Through the force of their gaze, however, external “preconceptions” came to have a structuring effect on political struggle in Samoa, albeit an uneven one. At the same time, Linnekin insists, Western pressures were not “hegemony” and Samoan “resistance” to external forces did not have in its armoury only “weapons for the weak.” By painting a finely detailed picture of the constituent inaccuracies in outsider views of kingship and their complex and regimenting effect as they motivated actors to intervene in Samoan chiefly politics, Linnekin avoids lapsing into simplistic discourses of objectivity, oppression, and resistance. By painting a truer, more ethographically adequate, and more ambivalent picture of Samoan history, Linnekin demonstrates the utility of Sahlins’s claim that colonialism is always mediated by the culture of the colonized. Her close reading of Samoan history exemplifies the scrupulous examination of historical record that Sahlins recommends to others, and



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displays the ways in which his culture theory can illuminate this material – all of it – in its particularity. Another constant in Sahlins’s work is humour and a gimlet eye – his ironic, acerbic wit often takes aim at the personal foibles of the colonial forces he examines. He shares this approach with his colleague and historical anthropologist Bernard Cohn (1987). Sahlins, like Cohn, has always been a master of irony, the bemused recognition of the gap between the ideal and its realization – indeed, the structure of the conjuncture is a fundamentally ironic social theory. Kaplan’s essay here continues this tradition with a fine-grained examination of the ironies of ethnography in colonial Fiji, and the way that one colonizer remade himself in the course of representing Fijians. Kaplan’s chapter about The Hill Tribes of Fiji (the book) and the hill tribes of Fiji (the people) provides a pocket biography of the transformation of an expatriate in Fiji from a Jew to a “Roman” – that is, from outsider to exemplar of colonial British rule – while, in the background, a local Fijian religious leader transforms himself from traditional figure to Jewish prophet. Kaplan’s point is made in the middle space where these identities cross: conventional history might enquire into the objective truths that these transformations “obscure” or “hide,” but an ethnographic history (as her opening quote from Sahlins reminds us) takes these transformations as its object. In the end the heart of Kaplan’s essay is a playful indulgence in a particularly juicy bit of particularity, something Sahlins will no doubt appreciate. This focus on the foibles of the colonizers and the agency of the Indigenes need not, however, be restricted to the nineteenth-century Pacific. Carneiro da Cunha’s chapter continues this ironic sensibility by telling the story of the spontaneous rise of the cult of a saint in the Brazilian Amazon, an endogenous appropriation of Catholicism. Many authors have focused on the indigenization of Christianity, but Carneiro da Cunha offers a unique twist on this theme by studying how the church then reappropriated this appropriation. The piece splendidly illustrates how structures are enmeshed in (and indeed, create) power struggles, how their repeated iteration can produce effects that appear, on the surface, to be contradictory – one of Sahlins’s main points against the afterologists. Like Kaplan and Linnekin, Carneiro da Cunha draws on historical records to demonstrate the time depth of the appropriative

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dynamics she describes, even though the case she studies occurs in the present. More fundamentally, however, Carneiro da Cunha’s richly detailed case study demonstrates ethnographers’ need not be apologetic for finding what they study interesting, and how a rigorous, humanistic anthropology can make illuminated moments of ethnographic particularity. This theme of the indigenization of external sources was part of Sahlins’s preoccupation with Indigenous cultural vitality in the early 1990s. We can see it in Carneiro da Cunha’s chapter, as well as in Fienup-Riordan’s. Fienup-Riordan describes the controversy surrounding the construction of a road near a sacred site in Alaska. With Sahlins, she argues that underlying what others might consider a “realpolitik” of interest represents culturally given ends being pursued using culturally given means. Her essay is particularly noteworthy for its demonstration that the “indigenization of modernity” is not a shallow affair. Where some have fastened on relatively superficial signs of difference, Fienup-Riordan convincingly demonstrates that the “past is old and the future is traditional” in a deep and compelling sense. As we hope the reader can see, Fienup-Riordan’s account of Indigenous agency shares important connections with Linnekin’s chapter, even though it takes place in a far-from-tropical location and nearly a century afterwards. The flip side of this demand for ethnographic adequacy is Sahlins’s critique of scholars who develop theories based on their cultural presuppositions rather than the empirical record. As different as they are, Sahlins believes socio-biology, cultural materialism, economics, postmodernism, and afterologies all share the same thing: a willingness to make a “lousy bargain with ethnographic realities, giving up what we know about them in order to study them”; see Waiting for Foucault, Still (2002b: 20). Sahlins often uses Sartre’s language to express this. In Search for a Method Sartre (1963: 28) accuses Marxist authors such as Lukács of “the terrorist practice of ‘liquidating the particularity.’” Indeed, if anything, Sahlins’s work suggests that anthropological particularism is more scientific than a quantitative or nomothetic approach. If the essence of science is an openness to putting one’s cultural conceptions at “risk” in acts of reference to empirical reality, then it is anthropology that has the better track record than those supposed sciences (from economics to socio-biology to Marxism) that amount largely to the projection of Western



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cosmological schemes onto the observed world. Rather than deal with the “equivocal givens of experience” they deal instead with “general particularities” (Sartre 1963: 28). As a result “analysis [on their account] consists solely of getting rid of detail, in forcing the signification of certain events, in denaturing facts or even inventing a nature for them in order to discover it later underneath them, as their substance” (27). Citing Sartre’s image of the “bath of sulphuric acid” that these beliefs throw particularities into, Sahlins (1976d: 15–16) insists that as a result “an understanding of the phenomenon is gained at the cost of everything that we know about it. We have to suspend our comprehension of what it is. But a theory ought to be judged as much by the ignorance it demands as by the knowledge it purports to afford.” We can see this critique of Western cultural models most explicitly in Tcherkézoff’s chapter. The best place to begin is his multiply recursive title. Sahlins has a long history of punning and allusive titles – for instance, he playfully entitled the first chapter of Islands of History “Supplement to the Voyage of Cook,” an allusion to Diderot’s “Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville,” which used Bougainville’s accounts of Polynesians to criticize European sexual morality. In doing so, Sahlins implicitly styled himself the anthropological philosophe drawing lessons from an English, rather than French, explorer. Tcherkézoff’s essay reverses this figure: now it is Sahlins himself who is the great way-finder of historical anthropology and Tcherkézoff’s supplement the scholarly supplement. But like Sahlins and Diderot, Tcherkézoff’s modesty obscures the genuine contribution that he makes. In his chapter Tcherkézoff returns to the sexuality that accompanied many of the first Pacific voyages. Through a close analysis of the written records of two early patrols he reconstructs the cultural dynamic that underlay these early couplings. Tcherkézoff’s account of the politics and power of these lessthan-idyllic encounters fleshes out the dynamics of sexual contact about which the Hawaiian material was often not sufficiently precise. At the same time, Tcherkézoff shows convincingly, as Sahlins would be the first to argue, that these encounters were embedded in and motivated by a cosmological scheme. Tcherkézoff’s piece is a valuable parting shot in the Obeyesekere-Sahlins debate by demonstrating that one need not succumb to Obeyesekere’s model of universal rationality in order to understand the fraught nature of sexual violence in the early modern Pacific.

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Tcherkézoff’s punning title points to another aspect of Sahlins’s work: his allusive, humanistic style. Several chapters in this volume share Sahlins’s and Tcherkézoff’s word play. We can see it in Martha Kaplan’s invocation of the Hill Tribes of Fiji and the Hill Tribes of Fiji, as well as Carneiro da Cunha’s “Chaisé-croisé” (cross-over), a title whose subtitle includes the chiasmic (crossed-over) phrase “Christianity appropriated Indigenous appropriation of Christianity.” Perhaps the best exemplar of the stylistic freedom Sahlins practices, however, is Greg Dening. Dening’s autobiographical narrative traces the course of Pacific history where his life and Sahlins’s intersect and diverge. This is the most reflexive and personal piece in the collection. This intimacy and immediacy is all the more bittersweet given that this was one of the last pieces that Dening wrote before he died. Dening’s essay is the least “scientific” in the volume, both in tone and in argument. In contrast to the story of continuity we have told of Sahlins’s biography, Dening’s own life story is more ambivalent and vulnerable. When our understanding of the same historical story changes over the course of our lives, can we really speak of unvarnished truth? Dening’s question challenges Sahlins’s epistemological self-confidence, but in doing so reaffirms their joint commitment to a humanistic and respectful account of Pacific peoples. Sahlins’s focus on ethnographic adequacy and the weakness of ethnocentric Western models makes him skeptical about the possibility of generalization. Consider this passage from his short textbook Tribesmen in which Sahlins expresses profound ambivalence about generalization: Different countries, different customs: no two tribes are the same in detail. Tribesmen, moreover, are like all people and any person: the more familiar with them one becomes the more difficult it is to recall one’s first general impressions. So what I am about to do – which is to formulate a generalized design of tribal culture – is plainly hazardous and perhaps futile. But such is the magic of the sociologist’s “ideal type” that, founded as it is on actual or pretended ignorance of the empirical diversity, inadequate as it is as a representation of complex realities, primitive as it may be as an intellectual procedure, it can yield remarkable insights into the particular case. (1968d: 14)



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Despite his suspicion of generalization, however, Sahlins conti­ nues to do it. As his description on the University of Chicago Anthropology Department website notes, “From time to time he drops … ethnographic particularities for high-flying cultural theory.” We can see this, for instance, in the encyclopedic syntheses he has produced over the course of his career, from Social Stratification in Polynesia to What Kinship Is – And Is Not. Although Sahlins insists that we focus on the particular, at times his work looks a great deal like Max Weber’s or Charles Tilly’s. Sahlins has distinguished between chiefly and big-man societies, performative and prescriptive societies, and generalized for instance and systemic and conjunctural agency. His writing is littered with generalized processural dynamics such as the structure of the conjuncture, transvaluation, and parochialization. In fact, he often invokes master abstractionist Gregory Bateson and his concept of schismogenesis. The closest thing to an encyclopedic synthesis we have in this collection is Jonathan Friedman’s contribution. In it, Friedman combines a critique of afterologies with a survey of European political culture to argue for a strongly realist position. On this account, structures are not heuristic constructs designed by the analyst, he claims, they are really there. Friedman thus takes issue with “postmodern” approaches that, he argues, claim that human beings are infinitely free to act. In contrast, he argues, action is culturally determined, culturally situated, and culturally interpreted. Friedman makes this claim by comparing two assassinations committed by people at opposite ends of the political spectrum. By examining changes in the political fields of European countries in the past forty years, Friedman shows how the assassins actually shared political positioning. Ethnic and political conflicts that result from change in contemporary Europe, he argues, can be understood in terms of the ongoing transformation of a political culture in which diaspora and hybridity are not a sign of a lack of structure and a postmodern freedom, but rather of the enduring cultural determination of human action. Here Friedman’s pan-European view (which even touches on the US political scene) comes to resemble Sahlins’s discussion of interculturality in the transformation of basic political structures; however, where Sahlins traces variations in the theme of strangerkingship, Friedman traces changes in “Occidentalism,” or how the right and the left come to see the European cultural project itself.

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Sahlins’s “high-flying theory” does not only take the form of ideal-typical typologizing. One structure of Sahlins’s longue durée is his insistence on the logical rigour of his theories. Throughout his career Sahlins has insisted culture is “the ontological basis of the discipline: our object was culture and our study was cultures: their natures as discovered ethnographically, comparatively and historically” (2009a). Although few have noticed, Sahlins has undertaken a truly four-field anthropology to produce a logically coherent account of culture. Although a cultural anthropologist, he has not shirked from examining the biological nature of human beings, whether it be their similarities to primates (1958), or the physiology of their perception of colour (1976a), or the evolutionary origins of intersubjectivity (2011c). True, he has redrawn the arrows between culture, individuals, and the environment over the course of his career. But this is a sign of constancy not fickleness: he has consistently interrogated the adequacy of the ideas he has inherited and abandoned inconsistent positions. When these ideas have not been logically adequate he has altered them, as for instance when he forged a logically consistent account of sui generis culture out of White’s paradoxical commitment to the autonomy of culture and the determining power of the environment. This more purely theoretical turn can be seen in the contributions by Webb Keane and Joel Robbins. In his chapter, Keane rethinks the categories of “material” and “meaning” altogether. Popular accounts of Sahlins’s switch from “materialism” to “idealism” take for granted the idea that these two realms are distinct and incompatible – and that culture must be shaped by one or the other. In reality, Sahlins did not switch allegiance from the “material” to the “ideal.” Rather, he sought to move beyond a world view in which they were opposed. Keane develops this position by engaging with archaeology. Taking as his project the famous – and enigmatic – archaeological site at Çatalhöyük, Keane’s goal is to create a “materialist semiotic” to make sense of a neolithic material culture for which we have no historical scaffolding. Keane takes issue with archaeology’s tendency to divide the world into physical, utilitarian, and deterministic phenomena, on the one hand, and symbolic, immaterial, and free-willed, on the other. Keane demonstrates that opposing the material to the symbolic fails to illuminate ethnographic materials. Rather, we must reunderstand material culture as meaningful culture. Finally, Joel Robbins’s essay presents the most sustained engagement with Sahlins’s work. In his close reading of Sahlins’s account



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of culture change, Robbins argues against contemporary disenchantment with “strong” accounts of culture such as Sahlins’s. People may make “discontinuity a project” and actively seek to change their culture, and indeed cultural structures may not perdure for long periods of time. Nevertheless, Robbins argues, none of these facts successfully indicts an account of the causal force of culture in culture change. Robbins thus offers at a theoretical level what the other contributors have offered ethnographically: a defence of a rich, humanistic anthropology. This, then, is Marshall Sahlins’s practice of anthropology – a rigorous, humanistic study of cultural forms that is dedicated to the specific, but also cautiously generalizes: an anthropology that has undergone transformations while retaining its basic shape, is rooted in a four-field tradition, reaches out to a broader audience, and is morally engaged. We expect more writing from Marshall Sahlins in the future, and we believe that the essays here demonstrate that his practice of anthropology will continue in the work of his colleagues, maintaining continuity even as it transforms over time. As Sahlins’s inversion of the old saying goes: Plus la même chose, plus ça change.

Notes 1 In addition to the works cited in this introduction, the authors have drawn on a CV provided by Marshall Sahlins, as well as their own conversations with him over the years, to supply the dates and personal details mentioned here. We thank Marshall Sahlins for reading a version of this manuscript and suggesting changes and corrections. We were, unfortunately, unable to add all of the “original lines” he sent us for inclusion in this essay. All errors and omissions are our own.

1 How Long Is a Longue Durée? Structure, Duration, and the Cultural Analysis of Cultural Change Joel Robbins The drawing together of history and anthropology has been one of the major stories in the development of anthropological thought over the last forty years. It is a story in which Marshall Sahlins has played a central role, and the making of a marriage between these two disciplines has clearly been close to his heart: the words “history” or “historical” have appeared in the titles of five of his books since 1981. To the conjunction of history and anthropology he has done so much to effect, Sahlins has brought a robust notion of cultural structures, and he has shown how such structures give distinctive histories their shape even as in doing so they sometimes open themselves up to the impress of individual designs or empirical situations that exceed their own terms, thereby finding themselves transformed in the course of the very processes that reproduce them. The most general of the structures Sahlins treats as factors in historical process are those that from the point of view of the cultures to which they give form can be understood as structures of the longue durée – cosmologies, systems of kinship and alliance, folk notions of human nature, and the like. They are the enduring conceptions of the world and its workings that make a culture, and by extension its history, unique. Sahlins’s account of how such structures lend order to history have been influential not only in anthropology, but in history as well. Taking as given the importance of Sahlins’s contributions to the dialogue between anthropology and history, this essay asks how we might read his work differently if we were to regard him not only as



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someone who has enriched our conception of history, but also as the foremost contemporary anthropological theorist of cultural change. At first glance, this move from reading Sahlins’s work under the sign of history to reading it under the sign of cultural change might not appear to be a big enough shift in perspective to be meaningful. After all, history as a discipline is marked by an almost obsessive interest in change (Bennett 1997, Patterson 2004). As Gerschenkron (1968: 12) puts it, “the historian – at the peril of losing his subject – must be interested in historical change, that is to say, in the rates of change that lie between zero and infinity.” Following him, we might say that for historians stability is just a zero degree of change, where change is taken as the normal state of affairs. For cultural anthropologists, I have suggested elsewhere, it is generally possible to reverse Gerschenkron’s observation – at the peril of losing their object, they must be interested in cultural continuity, that is to say, in rates of continuity that lie between zero and infinity (Robbins 2007). Four decades of cross-fertilization between anthropology and history, and various popular critiques of the culture concept during the same period, have somewhat muddied this picture. But it probably still remains valid to say that for most anthropologists, whether they articulate this as a principle or not, cultural change is a zero degree of cultural reproduction, where continuity is taken as the normal state of affairs. It is this long-standing alignment of history with change and anthropology with continuity that makes the shift from reading Sahlins as a theorist of anthropological history to reading him as a theorist of cultural change seem too slight to produce interesting results: if history is about change, then anthropological theorizations of historical process will by their very nature be theorizations of cultural change as well. Yet in spite of the fact that it might appear to be just a slight shuffle of the feet, I want to argue that making this shift in perspective can open up different questions for our reading of Sahlins and provide for them new answers. Furthermore, the shift is worth making if for no other reason than that the battle to interest anthropologists in history has already been won, while that is not true of the battle to interest them in developing explicit models of cultural change. Most anthropologists today see the value in taking an historical approach to at least some of the questions they ask of their material, and there exists no theoretical camp that resolutely opposes this view. By contrast, few anthropologists have shown much interest in developing theories of cultural change. To be sure, they have rushed to study

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phenomena like globalization, modernization, and development that presume that cultural change is possible, and they have developed a number of descriptive categories in which to place changed cultures (e.g., hybrid, syncretic, and creolized), but their concern with such matters has not been matched by a sustained effort to theorize the various ways cultures come to fit these categories by undergoing processes of change. It is against this background that Sahlins has to be understood as someone who has made a number of major contributions to the study of cultural change. In the most general terms, we can say that what makes Sahlins distinctive among those who theorize change in any discipline is that he has wanted to maintain a strong theory of culture – a theory in which culture guides perception and profoundly if not exhaustively shapes action – even as he insists that such a theory must be able to account for the reality of change. In this respect, he can be characterized, as Sewell (2005: 199) has it, “as a structuralist of the Lévi-Straussian school who is trying to create a theory of cultural change without abandoning his structuralism.” Or, as Sahlins (1981a: 6) himself has put it, he has wanted to show that “the sacrifices apparently attending structural analysis – history, event, action, the world – are not truly required.” In working to square the structuralist circle of cultural reproduction so that it can allow for change, Sahlins has focused on developing new conceptualizations of practice and of the event. The major strain of his theory of practice is so well known as to require little discussion here. In his model, actors risk the cultural categories that shape their perception of the world by putting them to use in structures of the conjuncture that are always in principle capable of exceeding the expectations of those categories and thereby modifying them (see Sahlins 1985a). A less-known strain, which he argues for most extensively in Apologies to Thucydides (2004a), points to the necessity of delineating the kinds of structural situations in which people are culturally authorized to institute change through their practice – situations in which change is not wholly contingent, but is rather the structurally expected or prepared bringing to bear of personal and situational contingencies on the course of a culture’s movement through time (Sahlins 2004). In Sahlins’s terms, when practice does result in cultural change either because the world does not fit the cultural categories actors



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bring to bear on it or because structures have aligned in such a way as to open themselves to change, the actions by which change occurs constitute an event. This is tautologically true, as events are defined in terms of change: they are “a subclass” of human actions, “consisting of those … that change the order of things [i.e., structures]” (Sahlins 1991b: 46). Given this, one of the greatest tasks that has confronted Sahlins in his attempt to maintain a strong theory of culture while also theorizing cultural change has been the need to find a way of accounting for events that allows them to be in important (though not all) respects an expression of the very structures they transform. This is where his theory of practice, and particularly his notion of the structure of the conjuncture, comes to bear most strongly on his theory of change. For it is in the structure of the conjuncture that cultural structures, by means of human practice that is guided by them, reach down into the world to shape events while at the same time those events reach up into the structures that helped produce them and tinker with their organization. Although Sahlins’s understanding of the relationship between structure and event provides the basis for a novel conceptualization of cultural change, it is also the case that the opposition between these two terms has long defined the relationship between history and anthropology (Sahlins 1991b, Sewell 2005). By drawing us back to that relationship, discussions that unfold in terms of the opposition structure and event are likely to divert our attention from issues of cultural change per se, and fix it rather on that set of concerns that is proper to working out the relationship between those two disciplines, for example, issues of contingency, of the importance (or lack thereof) of the individual, and, as I will argue in a moment, of the event itself. In what follows, I want to replace the structure/ event binary with a slightly different one composed of the terms continuity and discontinuity. My hope is that this opposition will focus our attention more squarely on questions of how cultures change. In what follows, I take both continuity and discontinuity to apply to cultural structures, and neither of them presupposes a notion of the event at all. This is useful in that it prevents us from assuming that all change is “eventful” – that is, that it happens as the result of a discrete, time-bound set of actions. It helps us avoid the view that, as Sahlins (1991b: 78) puts it, change only happens as a result of “a brief present” that becomes “the resolution of a long past.” Instead

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of defining change by the events that cause it, I want to define it simply as cultural discontinuity – and to see what kinds of new avenues of exploration this redefinition might open up. Once the conceptual move from event to discontinuity is made, one returns unavoidably, and perhaps even more troublesomely, to the problem of how to hold on to a strong model of culture and still talk about change. For if cultural structures are subject to discontinuity, does it make sense to talk about them as cultural structures in the first place? On the assumption that culture is defined by continuity – it is traditional, inherited, and enduring – contemporary anthropologists who cannot turn away from the reality of cultural change in the world they confront are wont to drop the notion of culture altogether, adopting a nominalist attitude and defining all of life as a flux of constant change. The moment a culture changes, such arguments go, it ceases to be a culture and so culture cannot shape cultural change. Instead, we have to accept that the notion of culture is at best an analyst’s construction, and at worst a reification created by actors struggling to reach their own goals. Beyond this dismissive argument, even those who are willing to hold onto a strong notion of culture tend to imagine that, since cultures are oriented toward their own reproduction, cultural change must be caused by something other than culture. Hence, in arguments about cultural change, culture cannot have a central role to play. To counter these kinds of abandonment of the culture concept in the face of change, my first task will be to return to the same structuralist tradition that has nurtured Sahlins to argue that continuity in time is not a necessary feature of a cultural order. It is perfectly possible for humans to inhabit meaningful cultural orders that do not last very long, and that are no less meaningful orders for all that. Once this is done, I go on to consider models of transformation that treat culture as a primary force in steering processes of cultural change.

Synchrony Revisited Structuralism in anthropology has both drawn support from the discipline’s long-standing investment in seeing culture as enduring and lent theoretical sophistication to the way this investment came to be understood in the later part of the twentieth century. But in developing a structuralist theory of discontinuity, one has to question whether or not structuralist theory actually presupposes cultural



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continuity in its foundations or if it is only by accident, as it were, it came to be associated with a kind of continuity thinking that was in the air for other reasons at the time of its ascension. One interesting way to sort out this question on the side of the general cultural currents that left their mark on structuralism would be by way of a close reading of Triste Tropiques and other of Lévi-Strauss’s works in which he mourns the passing of cultural difference. But for the kind of argument I want to make here, it makes more sense to start on the side of the intellectual foundations of structuralist thought, querying the extent to which they define continuity as a necessary feature of meaningful orders. In this spirit, I turn to Saussure’s discussion of synchrony. In its imagery of time suppressed, this discussion would seem to argue for the long-lasting quality of linguistic structures. Yet despite Saussure’s use of this imagery and the spell it once cast over structural anthropology, it is possible to argue that Saussure did not make or even imply a link between the reality or importance of any given system of langue and its ability to endure through time. Saussure (1966: 80) begins his discussion of synchronic and diachronic linguistics by arguing that they need to be distinguished because “language is a system of pure values which are determined by nothing except the momentary arrangement of its terms.” Because it is the relations that determine the values of elements, and not their own history nor the history of their relations, it is necessary to separate out the diachronic study of historical changes in elements of the system (and the systemic changes such elemental changes can cause) from the study of the synchronic relations that give elements their values at any given moment. This point is clear enough, but once it is made, Saussure’s argument quickly becomes confusing. In some places, Saussure seems to argue that a synchronic linguistic state is an analytic construction that the linguist posits for methodological reasons (Thibault 1997: 81; cf. Sewell 2005: 182). Such an argument can be inferred, for example, from the claim that one needs to take a synchronic approach to language because “the multiplicity of signs [in any language] … makes it absolutely impossible to study simultaneously relations in time and relations within the system” (Saussure 1966: 81). At other points, however, Saussure suggests that languages only effectively exist for users as synchronic systems, and that this is why it is important to study them synchronically: hence the key statement that “the synchronic viewpoint predominates, for it is the true and only reality to the community of speakers” (190) and the allied claim that “time does not exist

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insofar as the speaker is concerned. He is confronted with a state” (181). From the point of view of speakers, this second argument has it, it is diachrony that is an analytic notion – an intellectually motivated bringing together of elements that do not in reality condition one another’s value or shape people’s language use in the present. I bring up the coexistence of these two lines of argument in Saussure because accepting one or the other leads to very different understandings of the importance of synchrony to structural analysis. If synchrony is an analytic fiction, if as Saussure (1966: 81) somewhat unfortunately puts it, using the imagery I mentioned above, analysts get to synchrony only by “completely suppressing the past,” then the charge that structuralists routinely do analytic violence to languages and cultural worlds that in reality are in constant motion is difficult to refute. But if, on the other hand, human beings construe the world in terms of synchronic systems of linguistic and cultural categories – if history is something those who study living human beings produce only by expanding on the reality in which those beings live, rather than by observing an existing phenomenon – then there is no act of violence for which they have to answer when they carry out a synchronic analysis. Analysts have, on this understanding, no choice but to analyze languages and cultures synchronically if they want to know how languages and cultures work for those who use them. Having drawn from Saussure this argument for the reality of synchrony, I want to go one step further and notice an issue that he does not take up as relevant to his model of the speaker confronting the synchronic system. Nowhere does Saussure focus sustained attention on the question of how long a particular synchronic system has to endure in order to make meaning. Saussure’s discussion of the mechanics of language is free of any but passing references to enduring traditions, “Indigenous” inheritances, etc. Not only does his fledgling science not seem to need such notions (unlike an anthropology that would found itself on studying the “authentic” cultures of others), but the very reality of synchrony as a key feature of effective semiotic systems renders them irrelevant.1 We might add to Saussure’s claim about speakers confronting a synchronic system the notion that a speaker’s recipients must share the system to make much of what is said, and so a system needs to last at least long enough for the speaking “circuit” to run its course (Saussure 1966: 10–11), and we can also take on board his observation that given the length of time it takes individuals to learn a language, wholesale



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changes of an instantaneous nature would be impossible (72). But even with these assumptions about continuity in place, it is clear that in Saussure’s model of semiotic orders, a given language or cultural order does not have to last very long in its specifics to be able to carry out its function of allowing people to live meaningfully in the world. And I would further argue that none of the structuralists who followed Saussure have made a principled or explicit argument that counters this point. In laying out what I take to be Saussure’s argument for the reality of synchrony, my goal has been to reach a point where it is possible to suggest that the existence of discontinuities in culture should not lead us to question the value of cultural analysis – cultures can change from one synchronic moment to the next without ceasing to function as cultures for those who live with them for those moments. Culler (2007: 9–10) captures well what I am trying to establish: The term formalism has become something of a pejorative epithet in our era of historicisms, but formalism does not involve a denial of history, as is sometimes claimed. What it rejects is historical interpretation that makes the work a symptom, whose causes are to be found in historical reality. The Saussurian model can clarify this issue: it is precisely because language is historical through and through, always changing, that the distinction between synchronic and diachronic analysis is necessary, that we must relate any linguistic event to the synchronic system from which it emerges. If language were not so radically historical, we would have less need of the distinction. But what might appear to be a particular form or even sign is not the same in two different stages of the language, because what it is depends on what surrounds it. Although it is possible to read this passage as an assertion of the methodological importance of synchronic analysis, it is clear that by the end it is in keeping with my argument that in the structuralist sense synchrony is an ontological characteristic of meaningful orders. As analysts, we lose touch with the real existence of synchronic systems in human lives at our peril; indeed, Culler suggests, at the peril of our ability to understand history and change correctly. We are compromised in those efforts by failing to understand the ways such synchronic systems are always in force when people act, even if those actions lead to change.

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I hope to have come out of this discussion of synchrony with two claims firmly in place. The first is that cultural structures do not need to last for a long time in order to powerfully shape the way people live in the world. They can and perhaps often do last a long time, but cultural analysis is equally appropriate even in situations in which they do not. People who act effectively in the world at any level always act on the basis of a cultural system that is in place at least for the length of the moment in which they act, and to understand their action meaningfully it is that system we need discover. The second claim, a corollary of the first, is that cultural structures shape even those actions by which people intentionally or otherwise change the world and that, given this, to understand cultural change we need to understand the cultural structures that shape the actions that produce it. Once these two claims are made, the question then becomes that of how we can develop models of change as discontinuity in a way that gives cultural structures understood in the strong, synchronic sense, their full due as causes of such transformation. This is the question that guides the rest of this essay. One way to put what I am after in the development of models of change that are built around strong conceptions of culture is to say that I am looking for models of change that do not assume that people are ever outside of culture during processes of cultural transformation. Even theorists of change who are sympathetic to strong notions of culture often assume that change must in one way or another have extra-cultural causes. Sewell (2005), for example, provides a spirited defence of the value of synchronic analysis for those who want to study change: Unless we can represent to ourselves and our readers the form of life in one historical moment or era, unless we can describe systematically the interlocking meanings and practices that give it a particular character, how are we to explain its transformation – or, for that matter, even to recognize when and how it has been transformed … No account of change will be judged deep, satisfying, rich, or persuasive unless it is based on a prior analysis of synchronic relations.” (184–5, original emphasis) Yet when it comes to explaining change, Sewell turns to the individual variability of human beings, who are bound to understand the elements of a common culture in different ways (2005: 192–3).



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Elsewhere, in his important discussion of the development of the idea of “revolution” as justified popular violence in the service of political change, Sewell again posits the importance of an acultural source of change – this time in the form of liminal moments produced by structural dislocations that render culture momentarily less effective in shaping perception and action and allow for individual and group creativity (250–1, 254). In each of these explanations, the move from one synchronic state to another is caused by some action that is not motivated by either the old or the new culture: the practical energy needed to effect cultural discontinuity has to be drawn, it seems, from some source other than either the old or new culture and their usual motivating schemes. It must, that is, be mined from individuals and the dynamics of their private understandings, or from the general experience of cultural breakdown and the possibilities of creativity such breakdown allows.2 I have chosen to consider Sewell as an example here because of his sophistication as a cultural theorist. Many others could be found who adhere to some version of a structure/breakdown/new structure model of change. And the list of those who count on individual variation to generate change in culture is virtually endless. But Sewell is a superb reader of Sahlins and other cultural anthropologists, and I generally find his work to be some of the most valuable produced on the topic of cultural change. Unlike many who think culture is a useless or very limited idea and focus on what they take to be the obvious force of some real beyond culture (e.g., human nature, laws of development, the power of pain and trauma in shaping human life) in explaining social processes, Sewell works diligently to keep a strong model of culture in play in his accounts of historical change. His difficulties in offering a fully cultural account of cultural change, then, serve not to point up his own weaknesses, but rather to indicate how hard it is to construct such an account. In the remainder of this essay, I want to argue that Marshall Sahlins has offered us tools for doing so, and to expand on what he has offered us in a number of ways.

On Cultural Causes of Cultural Change A fully cultural account of cultural change would be one in which the analyst is able to explain the occurrence of discontinuities in cultural content without recourse to arguments about discontinuities in cultural process. That is to say, one would explain changing cultural

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categories and values without having to argue that at some moment in the process of change people’s action stopped being guided in important respects by culture. Sahlins’s best-known theory of cultural change, in which people’s actions are shaped by their cultural categories, which are then subject to change when the world does not fit them, satisfies these conditions well, and I take it as a baseline understanding of culturally conditioned cultural change.3 In work that followed Islands of History, Sahlins proffered some new models of change as a cultural process. He developed the most important of these models in the course of addressing a difficulty with the baseline theory as he had elaborated it in Islands of History. This difficulty follows from the fact that in the Hawaiian case he discussed extensively in that book, the driving force for change was the arrival on the scene of people from elsewhere whose lives were guided by a different cultural order. It was the ensuing clash of people whose actions were framed by different cultures that rendered the world recalcitrant to Hawaiian cultural categories. Sahlins’s account along these lines succeeded in explaining Hawaiian cultural change in terms of cultural process, but it left many readers asking if such explanations would also hold in the absence of an outside stimulus as powerful as the one that threw the world to which Hawaiian actions referred out of synch with the categories by which they did so: how, readers were asking, would a culture change in the absence of something coming to it from the outside? In a paper that introduces the most important of his more recent models of change, Sahlins (1991b: 45) responds to such a question by tackling the issue of what he calls “endogenous” or “internally generated events.” In laying out the causes of such events, Sahlins places the idea of actors risking categories by applying them to the world somewhat in the background, and develops a set of new models for exploring the ways cultural processes can lead to cultural change. One such model understands cultural change as the outcome of the operation of complementary schismogenesis between groups of people who share a general cultural framework. Sahlins borrows the notion of complementary schismogenesis from Bateson, and defines it as a “competition by contradictions, in which each side organizes itself as the inverse of the other” (Sahlins 2004a: 69). In putting schismogenesis to work in explaining historical process, Sahlins sees it as leading groups that begin by sharing a cultural background to progressively differentiate themselves from one another in ways



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that lead to cultural change. His key examples of the outcome of this process are the differences in internal organization that held between the Fijian states of Rewa and Bau on the eve of the great war between them, and the contrasts that held between Athens and Sparta at the time of the Peloponnesian Wars (ibid.). This model of transformation borrows little from the idea that what causes change is a lack of fit between the categories people apply in action and the world to which they apply them. But it maintains an emphasis on the idea that people create change by acting on the basis of culturally shaped understandings of the world. In cases of complementary schismogenesis, it is the culturally shaped understandings people possess about themselves and others that leads them to modify their own culture in relation to a negative example. Hence, the changes people make in the course of this process are based on actions explicable in cultural terms. A second model that appears in Sahlins’s later work aims to uncover the structural conditions that allow particular situations and the actions of individuals who take part in them to affect major cultural changes. Sahlins (1991b, 2004a, 2005e) discusses the structural mechanisms at work in cases where such change is possible as ones in which situations, by means of a series of cultural “relays,” become aligned with standing complexes of cultural ideas – thus allowing the resolution of the situations to modify the complexes of ideas to which they are linked. The examples he offers to illustrate this dynamic include among others the chiefly politics surrounding the war between Bau and Rewa in Fiji and the structural conditions that for a season allowed Elián González and the members of his family to become a preoccupation in US political debate around the turn of the millennium. What these and his other examples have in common is that all of them involve cases in which, first, existing cultural tensions are in play. For example, tensions between the political and kinship orders in Fiji, particularly as they oppose sovereignty of the chief to his relative powerlessness in the face of his sister’s sons – a tension heightened just before the onset of the Bau-Rewa war by the growing power of Bau. Or, in the Elián González case, the tension that marks the sanctity of the family in US culture when considered alongside its ultimate subordination to the market and the state. A second commonality between these cases is that they are ones in which the cultural tensions in question find themselves exemplified in specific situations in which the public takes an active

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interest in their workings out through the actions of those most closely involved in them. The resulting interlocking of macrohistories and microhistories, as Sahlins (2005e) puts it, allows a culture to change in the course of events in which people act in important respects on the basis of categories the culture itself supplies. To this point, Sahlins’s discussion of changes brought about by macro-micro relays is one in which cultural change is explained in wholly cultural terms. Yet in a further turn of Sahlins’s argument, matters become more complicated in this regard. Instances in which broader cultural tensions gear into specific situations, Sahlins (1991b: 63) argues, can turn persons into “social-historical individuals,” able to “embody a larger social order” they are then authorized to transform. Although their position as social-historical individuals is culturally prepared (either “systemically” or “conjuncturally,” a contrast I will not elaborate here – see Sahlins 2004a: 155), the fact that they occupy it does not erase their individuality. Rather, it creates a context in which their individuality can be brought to bear on cultural process in an unusually direct way. Sahlins discusses this in a remarkable passage that is unusual in his oeuvre and deserves to be quoted at some length. In this passage, he writes in terms of structure and event, and uses a terminology developed to elucidate his model of the way structural relays produce cultural change. This terminology includes “instantiation” (in which cultural categories become represented by “particular persons, objects, and acts”), “denouement” (the incident in which the categories are put into relation in actions), and “totalization” (when the consequences of the event are reabsorbed by a culture that changes in order to accommodate them) (Sahlins 1991b: 81–2). With this background in place, here is the passage I want to focus on: What makes the event is a dynamics of the incident that alters the larger relations figuring there – that is, in the persons of the social-historical actors and their social-historical doings. And what makes the alterations of the larger relations is the fact that in this lower-order incident, all kinds of considerations apart from the larger forces these actors instantiate, other forces of which they may be unaware, motivate them. Other beings and objects, with their own projects or causes and their own modes of action, affect them. Thus the famous “contingencies” of the event, with the effect of an “aleatory transition from one



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structure to another” (Le Roy Ladurie 1979: 114). These other series, however, are not in themselves contingent. They are only so in relation to the object of historical study; in themselves, they may be quite systematic. Here is a place, then, for psychohistory. For if by instantiation the totality devolves upon the person, and in the denouement the destiny of the first is submitted to the activity of the second, then society is decided by biography and – Durkheim and White forgive us – culture by psychology. (83) This turn in Sahlins’s argument is a challenge to the way I have been reading him to this point. Rather than a claim that culture exhaustively accounts for cultural change, it gives individual idiosyncrasies a key explanatory role. Are we then thrown back on the kinds of acultural models of change that assume that between any two different states of a culture there must exist a moment when something other than culture guides action and hence brings about the differences between them? Although it is difficult to fully quell the suspicion that Sahlins has in fact returned us to that common kind of model here (I cannot, in any case, fully argue against this claim on my reading of the text), I want to dwell for a moment on aspects of his account that at least render it much more indebted to cultural explanation than many other accounts that give acultural factors a role to play in processes of cultural change. An efficient way to bring out the aspects of Sahlins’s model that I want to foreground is to contrast it with the two explanatory schemes I drew from Sewell’s work in the previous section. Both of those schemes laid the causes of change at the feet of individuals acting on extra-cultural impulses, either private interpretations of cultural materials or creative ideas they develop in situations in which cultural structures have broken down. The way Sahlins’s model differs from both of these is that it insists that individual idiosyncrasies only gain a foothold on cultural process in situations that have themselves been culturally prepared for them to do so. In his model, individuals are not routinely able to bring their private understandings or culturally non-standard motivations to bear on cultural change. They can act in terms of them, of course, but the well-understood mechanisms, Durkheimian and otherwise, by which deviant acts are either put out of play or are put in service of reproduction usually prevent them from ringing cultural changes. Yet even as people’s personal particularities usually do not for these reasons register on

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culture, it is also not the case that culture has to cease to function, has to experience some sort of general breakdown, for them to be able to do so. Instead, what has to happen is that cultural categories have to settle on specific situations that can be made to mirror their structure so explicitly, so self-consciously, that the actors involved are able to bring their private projects to bear not only on the attainment of their own goals, but on the modification of the categories in question. What is distinct about this model among others that give individuality a role in change is that culture never stops being in play – the role of culture is never passive. Culture may not be sufficient to produce change on its own, but culture is necessary, and it thoroughly structures the very contexts in which individual idiosyncrasies work upon it. Fijian culture never stopped operating throughout the history of the Bau-Rewa war, nor did US culture cease to structure the events around Elián González. Instead, culture continued to operate even through the period in which it changed. In this respect, Sahlins’s model of macro-micro relays, despite the place it affords individual idiosyncrasies in the course of cultural change, is not one that has to resort to the discontinuities in cultural process in order to explain discontinuities in cultural content. With this conclusion in mind, it perhaps makes sense to distinguish not between models of cultural change that explain it in cultural terms and those that explain it aculturally, but rather between those that assume that culture plays a role throughout processes of change, even as the role it plays may sometimes make room for acultural factors to contribute as well, and those that assume that culture must at some point stop operating to guide behaviour if cultural change is to occur. Sahlins’s account of the process of structural relays would be an example of the former type. Such accounts have the virtue of lending no support to those who want to diminish radically the role that culture plays in social life, even as they are not naive about the roles other factors can sometimes play as well.

Discontinuity as Cultural Project Before concluding, I want to elucidate two more cultural models of cultural change that can be constructed on the basis of Sahlins’s work, though they each represent modifications of his own positions. These two models are linked inasmuch as both of them, like



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the model of complementary schismogenesis, concern complexes of cultural ideas that themselves push for cultural change and render projects of fostering cultural discontinuity collective preoccupations in the societies in which they hold sway. The first model I want to consider in this connection is one that aims to account for the emergence of cultural complexes that promote the rejection of standing cultural ideas and their replacement with new ones. The question this model seeks to answer is, how do cultures become explicitly discontinuity producing?4 Sahlins has provided an answer to this question in some of his writings that are not well known by comparison with the bulk of his work. The answer he has given is that cultures become explicitly discontinuity oriented only when those who act in terms of them are humiliated by some outside force such as colonization or Christian missionization that teaches them “to hate what they already have, what they have always considered their well-being” in such a way that they come to “despise what they are, to hold their own existence in contempt – and want, then, to be someone else” (Sahlins 1992a: 24). It is the experience of such humiliation that leads people to self-consciously reject the (often unself-conscious) project of reproducing their culture, and to develop a culture organized around the value of producing a new way of being that is discontinuous with that of the past. I have written at length elsewhere about Sahlins’s model of humiliation as a factor in cultural change and the way it fits with his better-known work on the topic (Robbins 2005; see also the other contributions to Robbins and Wardlow 2005). Rather than review the details of that discussion here, I want only to lay out one modification of the humiliation model that is necessary if it is to be included in that class of models that explain cultural change in cultural terms, without positing breaks in cultural process. This modification has to do with how we construe people’s understanding of the humiliation that moves them to develop cultural valuations of radical change. There is no shortage of discourses in the world that can lead people to interpret their own lives in humiliating terms. Sahlins, we have seen, offers colonial discourses and Christian conversionist ones as key members of this class, and to these we also can add developmentalist schemes and the language of marginality and temporal “behindness” they so often carry with them. Furthermore, there is, we are often told, the humiliation produced by the simple

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demonstration effect of superior technology and overwhelming power, or, nowadays, of the glamorous lives that other people are seen to live on television and in movies. The fact that these discourses and images are often encountered by people living in situations of considerable threat, violence, or material and social insecurity only increases their ability to lead people to condemn their own ways of life. From the point of view of cultural analysis of cultural change, these popular explanations for the advent of humiliation in people’s lives leave out a crucial cultural step. In order for people to grasp their humiliation in terms of discourses and images that come to them from outside of their own cultural frames, as these explanations suggest that they do, they would already have had to embrace those discourses and images in the very terms those discourses and images lay down: that is, they would already have had to experience significant cultural change. To see oneself as a sinner, one already has to know important parts of Christian doctrine, and to see oneself as undeveloped one already has to have a coherent (even if not accurate) sense of the benefits development can bring. If this is the case, then humiliation can only come after cultural change has taken place, and therefore cannot explain it. If we are to preserve humiliation as a cultural cause of cultural change, then, we need to modify our account by arguing that people first understand their humiliation in standing (or “traditional”) cultural terms, and that it is this traditionally framed experience of humiliation that leads them to actively engage humiliating foreign discourses that both deepen their sense of dissatisfaction and provide ideational materials for cultural reconstructions designed to overcome it. A brief example might be useful to illustrate the process of change I am describing.5 The Urapmin of Papua New Guinea are a group of approximately 390 people living in the Western Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea. They were first significantly contacted in the late 1940s, and Baptist missionaries were active in their region by the early 1960s. Yet the Urapmin were too remote and small a group to be of much interest to the Baptist mission, and thus they were never directly missionized by Westerners. In the mid-1960s, however, community and family leaders began of their own accord to send some of the children of the community to study with missionaries working among other groups in their region. Many of the young people sent to study with the mission converted and began to work for the mission as paid evangelists to more remote



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groups. During the period in which they did so, few of the older Urapmin who had stayed at home adopted the new religion, though they remained open to learning about it from these younger members of their community. This pattern held for a number of years, but in 1977 a charismatic revival movement swept through their region. It settled early in Urapmin, brought by some of the younger people who had picked it up at a regional Bible school they were attending. Upon its arrival, almost all members of the community felt themselves “kicked” by the Holy Spirit, an experience that convinced them both of God’s existence and of their own sinfulness. Within the course of the ensuing year, everyone in Urapmin converted to charismatic Christianity. As they did so, they worked together as a community to dismantle their traditional religion (tearing down its temples, discarding the ancestral bones that were its primary focus, and burning the magic objects that were crucial to private engagements with the cosmos as traditionally understood). Ever since the time of the revival, the Urapmin have also worked together to establish a new set of cultural understandings among themselves: understandings about everything from what human nature consists of, to how people should treat one another, to how the cosmos is organized. At the same time, they have laboured to eradicate every vestige of active engagement with or interpretation of the world in terms of their traditional religious ideas. They talk constantly in public about the need to stick to their new understandings and to be done with those of the past. Why did the Urapmin embark on such a rapid, self-directed course of cultural change? The answer has to do with the way changes in the cultures around them – especially in those whose members had closer contact with missionaries and colonial personnel – dislocated the Urapmin from the central position they had once occupied in a hierarchical regional ritual system that was one of the most prominent features of traditional life in the region. Premised on a division of ritual labour grounded in an unequal distribution of important ancestral bones and secret ritual knowledge, this ritual system united a large number of societies in a single religious complex. Within this complex, the Urapmin understood themselves to be paramount, or, at worst, to share paramountcy with one of their closest neighbours and allies. This understanding was a crucial feature of their sense of where they fit in the world. With the emergence of the colonial order, and the spread of mission stations that took off under its aegis, regional organization

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shifted its grounding. Groups with greater access to the government began to base their claims to regional importance on grounds other than religious ones, and many in those groups opted out of the regional system altogether by converting to Christianity. As these changes transpired, the Urapmin found themselves shifted out of the centre of their own world. No longer a major power in religious matters that concerned everyone, they were becoming a marginal group whose members had little to show for themselves in the revised hierarchies of value by which life was coming to be judged in their region. It was this shift that produced the humiliation that drove the Urapmin to seek change, and it was a humiliation they understood in traditional cultural terms that defined people’s worth by their role in regional relations and defined these relations primarily in religious terms. The fact that the humiliation the Urapmin felt was defined as religious/cosmological in substance helps explain why the Urapmin looked to Christianity as a way to address it, for Christianity offered them a new religious system, and one in which their physical location did not ensure their marginality (Robbins 2006). But what is crucial to recognize here is that their initial experience of humiliation was one that made sense to them in traditional terms; it was this humiliation that drove them to look for a new way of understanding the world and their place in it. My more general argument is that humiliation must often, if not always, work this way. One must originally find the motive for change in traditional cultural understandings, or else one would already be occupying a new culture. I can introduce the last of the cultural models of cultural change I want to consider in this essay by staying with the Urapmin example and pointing out that once the Urapmin had adopted Christianity for reasons we can describe as making sense in traditional cultural terms, their new religion offered them a fresh set of humiliations that put in place a cultural emphasis on eradicating the culture of the past. Defining traditional cosmological figures as demonic, and condemning the practices by which one approached them as sinful, Urapmin Christianity urged the faithful to work consistently to put the past behind them. But it did more than simply attack the explicit figures and rituals of traditional religion. It also defined as sinful traditional ethical ideas and ways of organizing social life. To the extent that the Urapmin hold on to traditional ways of construing and acting in the world in these respects – and they do hold onto to some of them because their new religion gives them no alternative way to



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organize society, a point I cannot do justice to here (see Robbins 2004) – all of them remain constantly in struggle to surpass their traditional culture, and in much of what individuals say and do they present themselves as working toward change. We might, then, describe the current Urapmin situation as one in which people’s original humiliation and adoption of Christianity as a new cultural framework from which to address it has made them all socio-historical individuals; each Urapmin person has taken on the transformation of Urapmin culture as a project to which he or she can and must make a contribution. The image of a collection of Christians who see themselves as socio-historical individuals licensed to change their culture undoubtedly sounds all too Protestant (cf. Errington and Gewertz 1995). But I would contend that such cultural formations, ones that demand change and define all members of society as historical actors capable of carrying it out, appear in many places today, not all of them marked by Protestantism. Deeb’s work (2006) among pious Shi’i Muslims living in the southern suburbs of Beirut offers a fine example coming out of a different tradition. The Muslims she studies are intent on “modernizing” their religion on their own terms, creating a culture that is different from those of both their own “near past” and “the contemporary ‘West’” (19). Through a self-conscious process Deeb (20–2) labels “authentication,” they aim to replace their traditional Islamic understandings and practices with “true” ones. Like the Urapmin, they constitute a community in which individuals feel they have both an ability and a responsibility to change their culture. Deeb’s rich ethnography of the lives of these Lebanese Muslims demonstrates across many domains of social life the way the cultural impulse toward change that marks their view of the world results in a situation in which people experience “a disruption in the way they practice, understand, and talk about Islam” (2006: 22). Moreover, she is able to document with precision the kinds of cultural changes they make, showing in detail how a culturally defined interest in cultural change can lead to concrete transformations. One of her finest examples of this process is her account of the changes pious Muslims have made to the series of rites known as Ashura. The Ashura rites commemorate the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, a crucial event in the definition of Shi’ism. Traditional Ashura ceremonies, which Deeb (2006, chapter 4) describes in detail, focus on arousing emotion and fostering the salvation of the participants in the future. Authenticated Ashura rites, by contrast, are carried

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out in orderly, less emotional fashion, and stress the importance of revolutionary activism and social welfare work in the present. These major modifications in the meanings of the rites are carried by numerous changes in their details: the authenticated rites do away, for example, with practices of self-laceration, change the way in which key recitations are made, and shift the representations of Imam Husayn’s sister, Zeynab, from ones that dwell on her grief to ones that highlight her leadership of Husayn’s community in captivity and her role in training them for resistance. Authenticated Ashura rites also feature much greater participation by women. Deeb’s ethnography provides far more details on the authentification process as it remakes not only Ashura rites but many other traditional ideas and practices among those pious Muslims who are committed to it. Her work can be taken as a paradigmatic example of an approach to culturally driven cultural change that proceeds by ratifying many or all members of a society to act as agents of change. With so many people in the world now self-consciously engaged with their own cultures – some by way of preservation, others by way of rejection – this kind of cultural formation is one that anthropologists are more and more called upon to understand. By recognizing it as one in which a specific dynamic of cultural change is in play, it should be possible to compare cases fruitfully across regions and more generally push forward a strong program of studying cultural change in cultural terms.

Conclusion During the same period in which anthropology and history drew closer together, strong models of culture as the most important force in shaping people’s perception of and action in the world began to fall out of favour in the anthropological community. The reasons for culture’s fall are numerous, but perhaps this essay has revealed the identity of one of the less often noticed of the many hands that pushed it down. This would be the way in which history’s traditional interest in discontinuity and change presented a challenge to anthropology’s similarly long-standing analysis of authentic cultures as enduring in relatively unchanging forms. As anthropologists turned to history, many found themselves wanting to recognize the importance of change in human life. To the extent that relying on strong notions of culture appeared to make it impossible to realize



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that goal, they were prepared to drop those notions and retreat to individualist models of social process, or universal accounts of worldhistorical development, or what Sahlins (1999c) has called “powerism” or power functionalism, or a host of less distinct schemes in which theoretical positions were not terribly well defined but arguments about culture (rather than the “cultural”) were without question out of bounds. In this conjuncture of theoretical ambitions and perceived constraints, the work of Marshall Sahlins stands out as unique. Refusing to abandon a strong model of culture as a condition of entry into the arena of change, he has made major innovations in how culture is understood. In this essay I have engaged this facet of his work, laying out some aspects of it, amending others, and attempting through my discussion of synchrony to provide an explicit argument for why it is possible to develop models of discontinuity in cultural content that do not depend on discontinuities in cultural process. My claim is not that culture controls the flow of change in its entirety in all cases. But I would like to think that it is in keeping with the overall outlines of Sahlins’s influential body of work to suggest that anthropologists ought at least to be willing to push culture as far as it can go in explaining all facets of human life. In the case of cultural change, that project has only really just begun. I have argued in this essay that there is thus great value in reading Sahlins’s approach to anthropological history as having given us key theoretical tools for exploring the crucial role that culture plays in shaping cultural change.

Notes 1 Chapter III of Part One of Saussure’s (1966) book Course in General Linguistics contains Saussure’s primary discussion of synchrony as a theoretical notion. The chapter that immediately proceeds it (Chapter II , Part One) does contain some statements about language being traditional and inherited from the past that may appear to contradict my claim that Saussure has no need for ideas about enduring traditions and the like (Saussure 1966: 71–8). But a careful reading of Chapter II will show that in it Saussure does not make any claims about how long a language must last to count as a language, and in fact he concludes his discussion with the argument that although impervious to change guided by individual intention,

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languages are always changing. These are the themes that he picks up from this chapter in the chapter on synchrony, and he never has recourse to an argument that the only authentic languages are long-standing ones. Sewell (2005: 193–4) also offers a perspectival model of internal social variability in which people with different social vantage points on a culture are bound to see it differently and these differences can lead to change. This has the makings of a more fully cultural account of change, but as such perspectivalism is wielded in contemporary anthropology and social thought more broadly, it often devolves into a kind of Western common sense individualism that in practice gives culture very little role to play in shaping social life (cf. Sahlins 2004: 186–7). I argue elsewhere that what I am calling here the baseline model is more complex than many readers have taken it to be, and I trace out a number of the facets of Sahlins’s work on change up through Islands of History (published in 1985) (Robbins 2004: 6–15). Here I focus on the models of change Sahlins developed after the appearance of that book. I use the cumbersome phrase “discontinuity producing” rather than, say, “self-transforming” to mark that the kind of changes these cultures define as valuable are those that make a radical break with what has come before. They can be distinguished from (though they are often also related to) modernist cultural formations that value change as an enhancement of existing features they already define as their strengths (e.g., technological advancement, individual freedom understood as autonomy, etc.). This account draws on Robbins (2004), in which the argument I present here is fleshed out in much greater detail.

2 Monarchical Visions: Constructions of “Kingship” in Colonial Samoa Jocelyn Linnekin On 18 August 1885 the Samoan high chief Malietoa Laupepa wrote a letter to Queen Victoria (Figure 2.1).1 Addressing her as “Tupu Tamaitai,” the “Lady King” of Great Britain and Ireland, Laupepa endeavoured to clarify Samoan political custom for her. He would have her know that, according to the customary beliefs of Samoa from the earliest times, he – Malietoa Laupepa – was the “real King” (Tupu) of Samoa. Laupepa’s letter to Victoria was but one of many appeals by would-be Samoan kings to foreign powers and powerful resident foreigners. During the protracted “kingship dispute” of the late nineteenth century, Samoan chiefly rivals fought one another with genealogies and mythic history as well as with armies of followers. The climax of this complicated saga was a bizarre courtroom battle in which an American judge had the task of determining who would be the king of Samoa. This chapter examines European and Samoan understandings and invocations of “kingship” during the decades immediately prior to formal colonial takeover, a period when chiefs warred over questions of customary precedence and the islands’ government seemed for a time to change hands on a daily basis. Foreign diplomats and entrepreneurs called the situation “chaos” and found the disorder intolerable. Thus, from the 1860s until the Western partition of the archipelago in 1900, an assortment of foreign settlers, consuls, and adventurers tried by direct and indirect means to institute a lasting, centralized indigenous government in Samoa.

Figure. 2.1.  Laupepa’s letter to Queen Victoria.



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From the anti-colonial perspective, the Samoan kingship dispute could be cited to illustrate the destructive effects of Western contact on native societies. Such an analysis might conclude that indigenous politics are irrelevant and ineffectual in the face of the structural imperative of core-state expansion. This interpretation would not do justice to Samoan political history. In contradistinction to older paradigms of unidirectional “impacts” on indigenous societies, Marshall Sahlins (1981a, 1985a, 1995) has problematized the contact encounter as a complex interaction between cultural systems that are foreign to one another. In the “structure of the conjuncture” a mutual interpretation takes place, each side sizing up and situating the other within a cultural value system. Creative symbolic revaluation is ongoing, reciprocal, and mutually influential. Samoan political conflicts of the late nineteenth century aptly illustrate how, in contact settings, foreigners and indigenous people symbolically construct their own and each other’s conceptual models, and deploy those novel constructions to achieve culturally specific goals. For a number of reasons, Samoa came into the Western orbit relatively late in comparison with other Polynesian island groups (see Gilson 1970; Hanson 1973; Holmes 1980; Linnekin 1991a, 1991b). The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of intensifying commercial interest and political meddling by citizens of the “Great Powers” – Great Britain, Germany, and the United States.2 With home governments leery of the risks and expense of far-flung territorial acquisitions, none of these three nations was eager to annex Samoa formally. Yet each wanted to protect its citizens and commercial interests, and – perhaps most importantly – each feared the consequences of allowing the archipelago to fall to one of the other powers. Strictly speaking, the colonial era in Samoa did not begin until partition in1900, when Western Samoa became a German colony and the eastern islands were allocated to the administration of the United States Navy. I apply the term “colonial” to the late nineteenth century because, although the archipelago was not yet under foreign rule, Western imperial priorities and aspirations disproportionately framed chiefly contestation. Most foreigners viewed the model of kingship as a culturally appropriate solution to the perceived problem of chronic political disorder. In the European view, a monarchy held the promise of stable, authoritarian rule. For elite Samoans, the kingship represented a possibility seldom realized in the past, but now more achievable because of the presence of settler

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factions with arms to sell and, sometimes, with military assistance to lend to one chief or another. During this period “kingship” was a contested narrative field for both Samoans and foreigners. It would be inaccurate to characterize the kingship as a foreign political model imposed on an unwilling or unwitting people, nor did the Samoan chiefs’ pursuit of kingly status indicate the adoption of Western modes of rule. Chiefly contenders embraced the goal of centralized rule as they played out long-standing family and district rivalries. Samoan chiefs knew that there was myth-historical precedent for a single ruler over a unified country, and they enlisted the European model to further their own political ambitions. Resultant incarnations of the kingship were chronically short-lived. Instead of putting an end to factional conflict and instituting the stable government that Europeans wanted, “kingship” sedimented a not entirely new direction in Samoan political striving. The quest for a Samoan king illustrates a mutually influential interaction between foreign and Native constructions and goals – a process whereby both European and Samoan scenarios for political rule in the islands were reoriented.

Of Chiefs and Kings During the early contact period in Polynesia, Westerners were preoccupied with the centring project – the creation of, and putative cultural precedent for, a stable unified polity ruled from an administrative centre by a head of state. Foreign visitors to Samoa frequently complained about “the want of power amongst those who are called chiefs” and made invidious comparisons with island societies such as Hawai‘i, where chiefs gave orders and could expect them to be obeyed, much to the convenience of foreign commercial interests.3 The limits of Samoan chiefly authority were perceived as a hindrance to spiritual conquest as well as to orderly trade. As early as 1835 Methodist missionary Peter Turner drew an explicit contrast with the mission’s success in Tonga when he reported to his superiors: “There are difficulties … of which we knew nothing in the Tonga group, viz. the want of a head to govern, a king … the common people do as they please, and it seems optional whether they do the commands of their chiefs or not.”4 Conversion strategies that had worked well in Tonga seemed, in Samoa, only to incite more community divisions. The tactic of “making presents” to ingratiate chiefs, for example, tended to backfire



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in Samoa. Where Tongans tended to be “satisfied” with a chief’s decision to redistribute or not, Turner noted, Samoans were likely to show their displeasure by aligning with another chief or by affiliating with the rival Protestant group, the London Missionary Society (LMS): “If he be a cheif [sic] – he will separate & build his own chapel for himself & his relatives. The same religion will perhaps have 3 chapels when the whole town does not contain two hundred persons.”5 Thirty years later, when Samoa was receiving much more foreign traffic, British Captain Hope gave an address “to the chiefs of Samoa,” critiquing what he saw as the most objectionable features of their society and instructing them on the political model they should emulate. Noting that Hawai‘i, Tonga, and Rarotonga had all established unified governments, the sea captain advised them: “You have got your islands divided into many different districts each of which is quite independent of others … It would be good for Samoa too if she had one head over the whole group, but if that cannot be there could at all events be one head over each island … But it would be far better to have one head who might have a council of Chiefs to advise him.”6 The Western powers’ ambitions were not uniformly imperialistic in the sense of seeking to acquire territories abroad. Government policy and settlers’ opinions regarding the future of Samoa often diverged on the issue of formal annexation, with officials at home maintaining that colonial interests could be served just as effectively, and with much less risk and expense, by means of laissez-faire economic relationships and informal consular influence on the government. For such aspirations to be realized, however, “a government” must be in place to ensure safe trade, protect private property, and make good on diplomatic promises. Europeans looked to their own political models for the form of the hoped-for indigenous government, and most saw monarchy as the logical choice for Samoa. The monarchical model would presumably satisfy foreign settlers’ demands for effective local control and, moreover, accorded with Western assessments of the native people’s developmental state and political maturity – or, more accurately to their mind, immaturity. The prevailing rationale was that peoples living so recently in a state of barbarism could not be expected to govern themselves democratically. Moreover, monarchy was thought to be “‘naturally’ suited to Polynesians” (Gilson 1970: 188). Westerners not only construed the hierarchy of the Samoan chiefly matai system as a precedent for kingship, but equated the two institutions

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as homologous political forms and readily categorized indigenous chiefs as “kings” (cf. Hocart 1927). “Kingship” implies a bundle of political ideas – the ruler as societal exemplar, a monopoly of force, centralized administration, and the prima facie existence of a “nation.”7 These notions seem ill-suited to Samoa, where political authority was dispersed territorially among the chiefs of villages and districts as well as functionally within the local polity.8 Formal authority in Samoa is associated with chiefly (matai) titles, and no single title in itself conveys authority within a polity larger than a district. The Samoan village council (fono) of chiefs has historically claimed decision-making autonomy in local affairs. Chiefly titles are associated with villages and carry the authority to administer and allocate lands belonging to extended families (‘āiga). Matai “titled persons, chiefs” are fundamentally linked to the local level through kin ties, for they are first and foremost the heads and chosen representatives of families (Mead 1930: 18; Meleiseā 1987: 7–8; Shore 1982: 71–2). The ‘āiga elects the successor to the family title on the basis of past service (tautua) and ability rather than by a fixed rule of inheritance. The matai’s dignity is associated with the title rather than with the individual from birth (Mead 1930: 122; Meleiseā 1987: 8). There is no ethnohistorical evidence that Samoan chiefs were physically or ritually set apart from their people, although some ethnographers were told that personal taboos surrounded certain “sacred” chiefs “in the earliest period” (Kramer 1942 [1902]: 17; cf. Mead 1930: 180–1). Despite the elaborate punctilios and oratorical obsequies paid to Samoan chiefs, the matai’s authority in most cases extended little beyond the family.9 Importantly, however, the highest titles have carried the potential for wider political reach since mythic times. Samoan political authority is further problematized by the functional and behavioural complementarity between two types of chiefs, ali‘i (high chiefs) and tulāfale (talking chiefs or orators). The distinction grounds a systemic tension in the distribution of power, in that “chiefs” are accorded greater ceremonial respect but “orators” have the political-economic edge. The high chief “is supposed never to injure his dignity by speaking for himself,” the British consul remarked in the 1880s (Churchward 1971: 25).10 It is the job of orators to speak for the chiefs in public meetings and officiate at ceremonial distributions, for which services they are customarily paid in cultural valuables – fine mats (‘ie toga) and tapa cloth



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(siapo). The norms of exchange give tulāfale the material advantage (Kramer 1942 [1902]: 51; Mead 1930: 77; Shore 1982: 245; Williams 1832 in Moyle 1984: 250); historically, the political import of the ceremonial goods meant that orators enjoyed considerable leverage over chiefs in such matters as the bestowal of high titles, marriages, and regional alliances (Linnekin 1991c). Perhaps most importantly for the present discussion, talking chiefs preside over, witness, and legitimate the bestowal of titles at every level. Although the ali‘i are higher in ceremonial rank, the orators have historically been the political operators and “kingmakers” of Samoa.11 The conflicts of the late nineteenth century revolved around a small number of high titles that were controlled by powerful groups of orators, principally Tumua, based in the A‘ana and Atua district capitals of Leulumoega and Lufilufi on Upolu, and Pule, identified with the principal villages of the island of Savai‘i. Both Samoans and foreigners recognized that certain eminent titles represented major regional and familial alignments and were thus significantly different from other, lesser matai titles in stature and political potential. Although the principle of family election pertained in theory, in reference to the high titles the notion of ‘āiga was so broadened that these statuses were effectively regional rather than the purview of a village-based extended family.12 While still identified territorially with particular villages, the high titles attracted the allegiance and material support of non-local chiefs, so that putative “family” affiliations “cut across territorial boundaries” (Gilson 1970: 52). Moreover, “family”’ could be invoked honorifically, retrospectively, or persuasively. That genealogies were reckoned bilaterally, and were considered esoteric and privileged knowledge, maximized the possibilities for such appeals. The discursive embrace of ‘ āiga “family” reflected putative genealogical relationship but did not guarantee allegiance. Intrafamilial rivalries, assertions of village autonomy, and precedence claims by particular orator groups translated into frequent defections and swings of support. Additionally, disputation is inherent in the matai system because the relative rank order of supra-local titles is ambiguous. Within the village council (fono), the order of presentation of the cup in the kava ceremony reflects and publicly proclaims the relative ranking of local chiefs. But since visitors are served first as a matter of courtesy, the ali‘i in a travelling party followed by their orators, the relative rank of particular chiefly hosts and guests remains an open

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question. That “high chiefs” are always served categorically before orators elides other crucial disparities, for many ali‘i titles are insignificant in their political stature and are far outweighed by the important orator titles in all contexts except ceremonial protocol. Westerners’ difficulty in identifying a Samoan “king” among the high chiefs was compounded by their own readiness to use terms such as “king,” “royal,” and “princes” for statuses that were in no way equivalent to the European concepts. The quest was further complicated by the nature and functions of Samoan political discourse, notably the esoteric chiefly language employed by orators at public gatherings. Samoan ceremonial speech is rich in metaphors, metonyms, mythical allusions, and synonyms for places, titles, and groups of chiefs. The meanings are culturally overdetermined and incomprehensible to an outsider, as well as to most non-chiefly Samoans. The chiefly vocabulary is used broadly, honorifically, and evocatively to show courtesy and to persuade in the public arena. The power of this language to mollify and persuade is enhanced by its imprecision in matters of relative rank. Ceremonial discourse leaves national-level questions of precedence unanswered precisely because such questions can provoke violence and, in the past, could spiral into regional warfare. Every matai in a leadership position commands the allegiance of a group of untitled males, whose cultural job is to guard family and village honour. The untitled men were and are expected to be somewhat hotheaded and quick to avenge any perceived slight.13 Westerners looked to the ceremonial vocabulary for words that might denote status levels in a fixed rank hierarchy, and particularly they sought an equivalent for the notion of “king.” One candidate was Tui, apparently a borrowed Tongan word, which the missionary Samuel Ella (1895) alternately defined as “synonymous with king” and as “lord or king.” The paramounts of Tonga and Fiji were known to the Samoans as the Tui Tonga and Tui Fiti, and Tui prefixes the titles of the highest chiefs of A‘ana, Atua, and Manu‘a. Ella explained that the Tui A‘ana and Tui Atua belonged, moreover, to the category of “sacred chiefs” (ali‘i pa‘ia), those who “possess special titles” and “to whom very great deference is shown” (2). There were and are several other collective designations for chiefs of the highest rank. The Methodist missionary George Brown14 cited “a higher class of chiefs who were called tama o le Malo – sons of the Malo or conquering party. These were addressed as kings.” Then there were usoali‘i



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or “royal family,” Brown reported, those from whom the successor to a high title would be chosen. Gilson (1970: 62) interprets the honorific term tama‘ āiga (sons of families) to denote contenders for paramount rule (cf. Tuimaleali‘ifano 2006). Ceremonial inclusion in any of these categories could be used to justify a claim to higher rank. There was more than one Tui, but there could only be one king. A consensus developed among foreigners and elite Samoans that the indigenous prototype of kingship was the Tafaifā, an ancient term denoting a chief who held the four paramount titles known collectively as pāpā (Tui A‘ana, Tui Atua, Gato‘aitele, and Tamasoali‘i). Tafaifā was a unique status that could only be held by one person at a time. The first Tafaifā was the woman culture-hero, Salamasina (Kramer 1958 [1923]). Her kin connections included the Tui A‘ana and the Tui Manu‘a as well as the Tui Tonga and Tui Fiti (ibid.). Salamasina is said to have ruled in about the sixteenth century on the Western time scale. “From then on,” Gilson (1970: 58–9) writes, “the holding of a single pāpā title was not the highest honour but, rather, a means of contending for the Tafaifā.” Salamasina is said to have received the four titles consensually, “by free gift from all the Tumua.”15 Thereafter the position of Tafaifā was frequently sought after but seldom achieved by chiefs of the prominent families Sā Tupuā and Sā Malietoā (the prefix Sā denotes “family of” and lengthens the final vowel of the name, which is both a chiefly title and a family surname). There was no “royal line” through which the position descended; the four titles still had to be acquired individually by conquest or by winning over the orator groups that conferred them. All of the principal contenders for the kingship were descendants of Salamasina. The extent to which Salamasina’s dominion constituted “rule” in the sense of command authority is unclear and unrecoverable, but there is no evidence of a redistributive network such as pertained in Hawai‘i’s more stratified chieftainship. Ethnohistorical accounts stress that the pāpā titles and the status of Tafaifā conferred ceremonial superiority and a right to a degree of “courtesy” rather than effective power.16 Infrequently achieved, the preEuropean Tafaifā seems to imply symbolic centralization rather than national integration. Europeans presumed that they could treat Samoan cultural traditions and genealogies as a body of evidence that, assembled and analyzed objectively, would reveal the true king of Samoa. They

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erred in two crucial assumptions, however. First, by conflating “chiefs” with “kings” in the European sense, they presumed the existence of a single linear rank order in which each high chief had a defined position. No such fixed hierarchy could be established for Samoa, however, in part because relative rank beyond the village was ambiguous. Second, foreigners failed to recognize the disjuncture between ceremonial rank and effective power in the Samoan chieftainship. The ritual respect due to a particular matai title had nothing to do with the outcomes of chiefly conflicts. Military success, not a title’s genealogical precedence, was the means of establishing supra-local rule. Though many titles could qualify as belonging “to the highest rank” on customary grounds, only a few chiefs could mobilize the practical support required to contend for the Tafaifā. The identification of ruling power (pule) with conquest is conveyed by the word Mālō, one gloss of which is “to win.” Samoans referred to the three imperial nations collectively as Mālō Tetele, the “great governments” or “great powers.”’ In the course of the nineteenth century Mālō came to mean the “government” capable of keeping itself in place. In the nineteenth century none of the four titles that made up the Tafaifā either conferred or coincided with effective paramount power, that is, military supremacy. Other titles and “families” had risen to prominence in recent history – notably Malietoa, Tupua, and Mata‘afa – producing chiefs who, though not considered to be of the highest rank, contended for the Tafaifā titles through warfare. The first Malietoa to acquire the four titles was the Savai‘i chief Vai‘inupō, who in 1830 welcomed LMS missionary John Williams (Moyle 1984). Although most Samoans and foreigners equated the kingship with the status of Tafaifā, the word most commonly used for “king” was Tupu. The relationship between the statuses of Tupu and Tafaifā and their associated modes of legitimation was central to the latenineteenth century kingship disputes. The varied referents and changing meaning of the word Tupu illustrate the dynamic quality of Samoan political concepts and their responsiveness to context. The explorer Wilkes (1845: vol. 2, 152), who visited Samoa in 1839, reported that Tupu referred to the “highest class” of chiefs; arguably, as suggested above, the same could be said of ao, pāpā, and ali‘i pa‘ia. Gilson (1970: 117) notes that Tupu o Salafai “Paramount Chief of Savai‘i” was “a dignity created and first assumed by Tamafaigā,” the notoriously cruel chief who was defeated by



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Malietoa Vai‘inupō just prior to the arrival of John Williams in 1830. Vai‘inupō’s brother and successor, Taimalelagi, also claimed to be Tupu o Salafai in the 1840s, but A‘ana and Atua districts refused to acknowledge his pretensions “further than as a matter of courtesy” (Stair, in Ella 1895: 8). Missionaries Ella (1895: 4) and Stair (in Ella 1895: 6) used Tupu, not Tafaifā, when describing possession of the four titles. Stair even claimed that the position of Tupu was superior to that of Tui. In the context of the matai system the position of Tupu was anomalous and inherently ambiguous. Historically recent, the Tupu was an after-the-fact status not associated with any particular title (hence not identified with any locality or district) nor conveyed by any Samoan modes of selection involving orator groups or families. In these two characteristics Tupu was similar to the Tafaifā. Was the Tafaifā – or the Tupu – a “king” in the European sense? Certain key ideas dominated colonial discourse about the Samoan kingship: concentrated military power, a political centre, laws, bureaucracy, a “royal line” of regular succession. Of these, only “the idea … of a centralized Samoa” (Meleiseā 1987: 2) was unequivocally embodied in the Tafaifā. Only in this sense was the Tafaifā an indigenous prototype of monarchy. For Westerners, however, “kingship” implied not only unitary rule, but a particular governmental structure with legalistic institutions supported by a monopoly of force.

Conjuncture In late nineteenth-century Samoa “Tupu” was simultaneously a position of power to be pursued by both precedented and novel means, an institutional hybrid, and a contested narrative field. The pursuit of the kingship sedimented a direction in regional and factional rivalries, which increasingly took the form of a competition to acquire the pāpā. Some chiefly contenders sought first to establish themselves as Tupu through foreign patronage, then to claim the pāpā titles by means that other factions with their own foreign supporters viewed as illegitimate. The positions of Tupu and Tafaifā were thus equated or separated opportunistically, according to the contender’s political interests and bases of support. Representatives of the colonial powers were both actors on the scene and an audience of potential arbiters to be courted and swayed. Arms sales and the offshore presence of military force presented new opportunities for

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gaining advantage, and Great Power recognition of a government constituted a new, non-customary form of political legitimation. Effectively, Tupu came to denote a paramount ruler installed and/ or sustained by settler factions and imperial military force. During the kingship dispute both Samoans and foreigners heatedly debated questions of custom in public arenas such as the expatriate newspapers. Westerners took different points of view on the arcane cultural complexities. Some ridiculed Samoan factionalism and elaborate public etiquette as the trivial preoccupations of a primitive people. With the deepening involvement of the imperial nations in Samoan affairs, however, the significance of chiefly politics could not be ignored. Missionaries and other resident experts interviewed Samoan chiefs on political questions and earnestly attempted to construct an authoritative version of the system, all in quest of a precedent for a stable government. At issue in these researches were categorizations of the high titles; the nature of the collective labels – whether formulaic or constituting a charter for primacy; the relationships between these groupings – whether discrete, overlapping, or synonymous; as well as the relative authority of particular districts and orator factions to confer the paramount titles. But the information obtained from Samoans inevitably reflected regional, familial, and factional interests, with different versions equally defensible on grounds of customary precedent and genealogical charter depending on the source’s point of view. In foreign discourse during this period the issue of the kingship was bound up with contending assessments of Samoans as a people. Many settlers responded with zest to the intellectual challenges of Samoan tradition and set out to master the details and nuances as if the chieftainship were a challenging puzzle that any civilized man ought to be able to solve. Some foreigners proudly claimed insider knowledge on the basis of their friendships with high chiefs, and they argued over mythic events and chiefly bequests in letters to the editor of the Samoa Times. Frustrated consuls, planters, and traders invoked the Samoans’ failure to unify as evidence of cultural backwardness and political incompetence (e.g., Samoa Times, 30 Mar. 1878, 2; Samoa Weekly Herald, 2 Sept. 1893, 2). As early as 1880 the British vice-consul pessimistically suggested that Samoa had no indigenous equivalent to kingship and, moreover, that a foreignsupported monarch “is not in the least likely to lead to the formation of a strong and independent native Government” (Maudsley



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1880: 94). Calling the 1890s monarchy a “burlesque,” American Consul-General Mulligan (1895: 745) wrote, “A King and peace are irreconcilable.” In rebuttal, contemporaries argued that foreigners were responsible for the very instability that they ostensibly aimed to remedy (Maudsley 1880: 92; Mulligan 1895: 743; Samoa Times, 16 Mar. 1889, 2). The English missionaries tended to take a sympathetic liberal view of the situation, blaming settlers and governments for the Samoans’ apparent inability to unite. “The fact is,” Ella wrote, “an established constitution existed from ancient times, but foreign Powers have ignored the native constitution and sought to establish a policy of their own construction” (1895: 1). Foreigners looked back with longing on Malietoa Vai‘inupō (Tavita), who was said to be the last “undisputed” Tafaifā.17 Vai‘inupō won a decisive military victory in 1830, the year that he met missionary John Williams and ostensibly converted to Christianity, and on these counts he appeared the most credible leader to Europeans during the first decade of intensive Western contact (Gilson 1970: 59–60; Henry 1979 [1958]: 134–42; Kramer 1942 [1902]: 27; Williams 1830 in Moyle 1984). He obtained the four titles over a course of years, and it is uncertain how long he held them before his death in 1841 (Gilson 1970: 88n64; Henry 1979 [1958]: 142; Kramer 1942 [1902]: 28). Malietoa’s dying bequest (mavaega) was that there should be no more Tafaifā; the titles were to be “scattered” among the districts. Malietoa named his brother Taimalelagi to inherit the titles Gato‘aitele, Tamasoali‘i, Malietoa, and the honorific “Tupu o Salafai,” while Tui A‘ana and Tui Atua went to chiefs of those districts (Gilson 1970: 117). Despite missionary counsels for peace and attempts to prohibit war by expelling combatants from church membership, the 1840s and 1850s were marked by chronic warfare. But these conflicts centred around issues of regional dominance – who was to be Mālō and who vaivai, the defeated or “the weak” – rather than pursuit of the Tafaifā titles as such. Although interdistrict disputes had implications for the bestowal of the pāpā, the kingship crystallized as the focus of conflict only in subsequent decades. Gilson (1970: 121) notes that the war of 1848–57 was the last “in which European intrigues played no substantial part and the first to be influenced by European arms.” Actions by American and British warships became more frequent in the 1850s, albeit in local incidents involving crimes against their citizens rather than in any

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national-level cause (see Gilson 1970: 152–6, 198–221). At the close of the war in 1857 Mata‘afa Fagamanu of the Tupua family was Tui Atua and the other three pāpā titles were held by a relative of Malietoa Vai‘inupō (Gilson 1970: 262). In 1860 a split arose within Sā Malietoā over succession to the title, which “for the sake of peace” was divided between the principal contenders, Talavou and Laupepa.18 In the late 1860s, motivated in part by foreign counsel and appeals such as Captain Hope’s (quoted above), the chiefly councils of the different districts began to address the issue of governmental integration. At the time, given the apparent dormancy of the Tafaifā, the model for a national government favoured by most Europeans was a confederation of districts. The question of the head of state inevitably provoked disunity. In Tuamasaga, the central district of Upolu, the formation of a government foundered on the factional dispute between the two Malietoas, both of whom were declared “king of the Tuamasaga” by their supporters. Laupepa’s parliament began to meet in Apia (the capital of Samoa today) rather than Malie, the old district capital and customary residence of the Malietoas, “owing to advancing commerce and the increase of European merchants and settlers.” Talavou’s party followed suit, establishing a rival government at Mulinu‘u Peninsula on the other side of Apia Bay, and became known as the “Unionists” after espousing the aim of national confederation. In its efforts to craft a “union” the Talavou camp sought both European legitimation and Samoan-style dominance in the status of Mālō. “One must allow,” Gilson remarks in reference to Talavou’s confederation, “for the Samoans having played on the uninformed hopes of Europeans” (1970: 265). The conflict between the two Malietoas was not at first a “kingship” dispute. Although foreigners used the term “king” to describe the heads of the competing governments in Apia, at stake initially was the paramount chieftainship of Tuamasaga. Europeans of the time typically referred to the high chief of a district, such as the Tui Atua, as a “king.” The issues of factional leadership and districtwide rule increasingly became conflated with the question of a national government, however, in Samoan political striving as well as in foreign conceptualization. The prevalence of the term “king” in contemporary European discourse points to the monarchical model’s prominence in the Western interpretive “vision” of Samoan political authority. The significance of the Malietoa dispute was amplified



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by the fact that Tuamasaga district included Apia, and despite the declaration of the town as a “neutral zone” foreigners were involved in the war as mediators, arms sellers, land grabbers, and occasionally as partisan targets. There were also national-level implications in the geographical dispersal of each contender’s adherents. Though Laupepa’s strongest support lay in Tuamasaga, and Talavou’s in the islands of Manono and Savai‘i, each had adherents in every district. What appeared to foreigners as a lack of consensus could be construed by either party, paradoxically, as a claim to national representativeness. Pursuing this strategy, some pro-Talavou chiefs of Atua and A‘ana came to Apia ostensibly “to mediate,” Turner reported, “but in reality wished to constitute a new government for the whole of Upolu, Manono and Savaii” (Turner, ms). Laupepa expelled the Unionist delegates from Apia in 1869 and became – briefly – the self-proclaimed “king” of an all-Samoa government (Whitmee 1870). Talavou prevailed militarily over the short term, and in an earlier time might have attained the status of Mālō. But Samoan political conflicts were now further complicated by foreign interference in various forms, from acts of callous exploitation, such as the arms sales and land grabbing of the early 1870s (see Gilson 1970: 271–90), to peacemaking attempts. Henceforth the presence of external military forces made it impossible for any faction to achieve a decisive victory and establish paramount rule by conquest – the Mālō. At the urging of resident foreigners, particularly the missionaries, the two Malietoas made peace in 1873, and Talavou withdrew to Savai‘i. In a significant event for the kingship quest, the chief who held three of the four pāpā titles died in 1870. Tuimaleali‘ifano Sualauvi – described by one missionary19 as “the king of Aana & Atua” – lacked only the Tui Atua title to be the Tafaifā, but he supported Laupepa and did not contend for the kingship. “Both war parties joined in paying him funeral honours,” the missionary reported. This example underscores the separation between ceremonial rank and political power and the discontinuity between Tafaifā and Tupu in Samoan conceptualization. The 1870s were a decade of governmental experimentation during which, for the most part, the “kingship” was an institutional office designed largely by Westerners and having little to do with the Tafaifā. Foreigners counselled the Samoans to establish a central government but at the time, and for the next quarter of a century, many anticipated that one of the Western powers would soon annex

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Figure 2.2.  Mata‘ata Iosefo.

the islands. In 1878 the editor of the Samoa Times (2 Mar., 2) noted with exasperation that “during the past four years we have had no less than five different forms of government, none of which appear to have given satisfaction to the various native factions.” In 1873 the Samoan chiefs formed a bicameral government at Mulinu‘u Peninsula; to avoid reviving the kingship controversy none of the principal contenders for the Tafaifā titles was included in the new government (Gilson 1970: 292), which lasted about fifteen months. “The natives were then tired of the republican form of government,” according to the jaded Samoa Times editor (30 Mar. 1878, 2), “and were desirous of making a kingdom of their country.” The Mulinu‘u government then devised a dual kingship, with the lower house of the legislature to select one king from Sā Malietoā and one from Sā Tupuā. The latter compromise seemed only to exacerbate factional antagonism, however, as Malietoa Laupepa was chosen over Talavou, and a chief



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named Pulepule was selected over Mata‘afa Iosefo (Figure 2.2), who appeared the strongest Tupua candidate. Mata‘afa’s supporters accused the LMS missionaries of lobbying against him because he was a Roman Catholic (Gilson 1970: 312). The dual kingship lasted only a few months. An American adventurer, “Colonel” A.B. Steinberger, had established an extraordinary degree of rapport with the Samoans, and in 1875 proposed a new constitution.20 Steinberger’s solution was an alternating kingship, with representatives of the Malietoa and Tupua families to take turns holding the office in four-year terms. The plan was acceptable to Samoans, Gilson (1970: 314) notes, because the new “king” was to be “merely a figure-head,” without the status of Mālō. Effective administrative power was given to Steinberger, whom the Samoans named as premier. But ten months after Malietoa Laupepa became the first “king” under the new constitution, Steinberger himself was deposed at the instigation of foreign settlers, backed by an American warship. Laupepa was pressured to sign Steinberger’s deportation order, and was then himself deposed by the Samoan legislature. The American naval captain unsuccessfully attempted to restore Laupepa by force, provoking a bloody clash in which several Samoans and sailors were killed. In the aftermath of the Steinberger affair Samoans were ever more internally divided.21 With both the Tafaifā and the constitutional kingship vacant the Laupepa/Talavou rivalry resurfaced, and factions formed around two contenders from the Tupua family, Tui Atua Mata‘afa and Tui A‘ana Tupua Tamasese: “Many of them say that the day that is appointed to make a new King is the day that war will commence in earnest in Samoa.”22 The Mulinu‘u parliament upheld the Steinberger constitution and remained in place, but it failed to perform the functions that foreigners expected of a central government.23 Laupepa set up a rival capital in A‘ana district but was defeated by the Mulinu‘u forces, which thus attained, in Samoan eyes, the status of Mālō. But the regime still came up short as a “government” in the estimation of Westerners and was vulnerable to foreign pressure, plotting, and Steinberger-style political entrepreneurship.24 In late 1878 Talavou’s party declared him “king” and took the place of the parliamentary regime in Mulinu‘u. One of Talavou’s strategies for establishing his government’s legitimacy was to proclaim laws and circulate them to the foreign consuls.25 He signed these as Malietoa, the “Tupu.”

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War broke out again in late 1879 between Talavou’s forces and the “old Government party.”26 By the terms of a peace agreement negotiated on board a German warship, Malietoa Talavou was appointed king (Tupu) for life and Laupepa made Regent (Sui Tupu, vice-king or king’s representative) to “attend to the work of the king” (Samoa Times, 10 Apr. 1880, 2). Amid shifting factional alignments another war erupted (Gilson 1970: 372–3). Talavou’s death changed the political scene, however, and the Tupua chiefs emerged as Laupepa’s principal rivals in contention for the kingship. In 1881 Laupepa was again proclaimed king through a peace settlement negotiated, this time, on an American ship. The agreement revived Steinberger’s idea of an alternating Malietoa/Tupua kingship; Tamasese was named regent and was to succeed Laupepa after a term later set at seven years. Laupepa’s credentials for the kingship were debated in the expatriate newspaper Samoa Times. A pro-Laupepa writer (30 Apr. 1881, 2) cited as supporting evidence the perpetual bequest of “the chief rule” by a Malietoa ancestor. Another correspondent countered (14 May 1881, 2): “there is only one of the whole line of Malietoas who can be said to be a King, and that was Tavita [Vai‘inupō] … Malietoa is the family name of a chief, of a second grade … [inferior to] the princes or higher chiefs of the Group called the Alo alii. Laupepa is a true Malietoa by descent, but has no claim to a King through the name.” Vai‘inupō, according to this writer, was the adopted son of one Pea Tavini of Manono, on whom the districts of Upolu bestowed the four high titles, “yea, the Kingship … In Samoan custom a chief holding these titles is a King, or highest divinity.” A third correspondent (17 May 1881, 2) criticized all parties for discussing chiefly genealogies in print: “The consequences of doing so among the Samoans themselves have often been terribly severe.” Nevertheless, he offered his own conclusion on the matter: that Malietoa was neither a second-rank title nor subservient to another group of chiefs. The writer also challenged the others’ interpretations of chiefly terms of address as indicating relative status, and asserted the priority of the category Tama‘ āiga: “There are but two chiefs to whom this title properly belongs … Malietoa and Mataafa.” Though initially supported by the Western powers, the Malietoa government had little effective power over either Samoans or foreign settlers. What authority it did have was steadily undermined by foreign intriguing, notably on the part of German officials



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and the major German trading firm in the islands, the Deutsche Handels- und Plantagen Gesellschaft der Südseeinseln zu Hamburg (DHPG).27 The company had long taken advantage of the conflicts by aggressively acquiring land in exchange for arms and ammunition, and it now waged a campaign to subjugate or dislodge the Malietoa regime. Under pressure from the firm’s manager and the German consul, who were supported by warships, Malietoa yielded legal authority to German officials. The government’s opponents were encouraged to break with his regime, and in January 1885 the Tumua orator group issued a statement that they were through with Malietoa and were supporting Tupua Tamasese; Mata‘afa was one of the signers.28 In another declaration addressed to “all men” (tagata uma), the Tumua chiefs blamed Malietoa’s “stupidity” for causing the trouble between Samoa and Germany, and asserted that “foreigners have no right to rule Samoa; this authority still rests with Tumua.”29 Tamasese established a rival government in Leulumoega, the principal village of A‘ana district, and began sending out letters headed “the capital [laumua] of Samoa” and signed by himself as “Tupua the king [Tupu] of Samoa.” Both sides in the “A‘ana rebellion” invoked customary precedent in public appeals to the foreign audience. From Leulumoega the chiefs of Tamasese’s legislature wrote to the British consul to inform him of “the belief that is customary in our country.”30 “Malietoa is not the name of the King of Samoa. It is only the name of a chief of one town. It is a new thing to call Malietoa the King of Samoa.” The pāpā titles, they continued, are the “true designation of the King of all Samoa” and “it is Tumua that have the authority over them.” The chiefs also claimed that Malietoa had little support among Samoans, and was only in power because of Great Power meddling.31 Learning of this missive, Malietoa Laupepa wrote directly to Queen Victoria to explain “the customs of our country beginning from ancient times” in his own favour: Malietoa is indeed the name of the King of Samoa. It has been taught in all parts of Samoa from former times … Malietoa has the true authority over the Papa because Tui Atua and Tui A‘ana were true sons of Malietoa. Likewise Tamasoali‘i and Gato‘aitele … became high titles by the command of Malietoa Uitualagi on account of their kindness to his son Malietoa La‘auli … only a chief of Sa Malietoa can give any of these titles.32

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Malietoa asserted, moreover, that it was a “new idea” for Tumua to claim collective authority over Tui Atua and Tui A‘ana, for these titles were created by a Tuamasaga chief in conjunction with Malietoa. Therefore Malietoa rightfully controlled “all of the papa.” Malietoa and the legislature were ousted from Mulinu‘u – evicted by the DHPG – and set up a government in exile in Tuamasaga. Tamasese’s short-term success was immediately attributable to the presence of German warships, but questions of customary legitimation continued to concern foreign observers as well as the Samoan protagonists. Depending on the cause to be served, partisan discourse asserted the priority and the fixity of formal rank relations, or the principle of conquest and the right of the Mālō. The missionary Newell jotted in his diary: “The Malietoa acquired by conquest the Tafaifa … Malietoa is not Tupu but Tupua is the Tupu by hereditary descent.”33 In his notes Newell differentiated rule by conquest from “the real pule” – pule meaning authority – which was legitimated by reference to genealogies and myth-historical political relationships. As illustrated by Malietoa’s letter to Queen Victoria, however, such precedents were eminently contestable. In 1887 the German consul and the DHPG manager sent a company employee and ex-military officer named Eugen Brandeis to assume the position of premier under Tamasese. For a year and a half Brandeis effectively ran the government, using German military backing to institute what Gilson (1970: 393) has called a “reign of terror.” Malietoa surrendered to Brandeis and the German consul and was exiled from the islands. Arguably the regime’s most tyrannical acts involved the collection of taxes, which the Samoans raised by mortgaging their lands and their copra to the German company (Linnekin 1991c). With the government’s support, the DHPG firm was able to contract agreements that prevented the Samoans from trading with other companies.34 During the Brandeis-Tamasese regime, for the first time in post-contact Samoa, one Western power exercised a monopoly of force in the archipelago and used it to compel Samoans to obey the laws of a national government. The degree of force required to accomplish this, however, appeared egregious to the other Western powers and led to a revolt by the Samoan factions that had once supported Tamasese. For Samoans, the critical provocation was Tamasese’s appropriation of the pāpā. Holding only the Tui A‘ana title but encouraged by Brandeis to claim the others, Tamasese began to sign his proclamations “Tuiaana Tuiatua Tamasese o le Tupu,” “Tamasese the King” (emphasis added).



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Atua district was so outraged by this pretension that German naval intervention was required and a number of chiefs were imprisoned (Gilson 1970: 394). Support grew for Tui Atua Mata‘afa, who was appointed both Malietoa and Tupu by the orator groups Tumua and Pule.35 Once again there were two competing “national” governments issuing correspondence from the “capital of Samoa.” Tumua and Pule claimed to express the will of “all Samoa” and styled themselves “Rulers of Samoa” (Samoa Times, 29 Sep. 1888, 1). The Brandeis-Tamasese government was driven from Mulinu‘u in October 1888 and set up their “capital” in an inland village. This conflict nearly brought the three Western powers to war; their confrontation ended in the famous Apia hurricane disaster of March 1889, in which six foreign warships were destroyed. To many observers the hurricane debacle symbolized the futility and the costs of continued Great Power rivalry over Samoa. One school of foreign opinion held that Westerners had erred in preventing the Samoans from settling the question of the Mālō militarily: “Make as many governments as you like there will always be two factions till one conquers the other” (Samoa Times, 16 Mar. 1889, 2). Nevertheless, the three powers attempted to exert more control in the immediate aftermath rather than less. Malietoa returned in 1889 and accepted the major factions’ decision to appoint Mata‘afa king and himself the vice-king (Gilson 1970: 417). But in the 1889 Berlin conference the Western nations proclaimed Malietoa Laupepa king, thereby assuring continued factional strife in the 1890s. Many claimed that Mata‘afa had the support of most Samoans,36 while the Laupepa government, ineffectual and isolated in Apia, was kept in power by Western naval support (Samoa Weekly Herald, 15 July 1893; Gilson 1970: 420). Mata‘afa styled himself Malietoa Mata‘afa, effectively asserting his equivalence with Laupepa, and both chiefs claimed the Tui A‘ana title. In 1893 Mata‘afa was deported and fines were imposed on the “rebel towns” (Samoa Weekly Herald, 29 July, 5 Aug.). But the rebellion continued, and foreigners despaired that a stable “kingship” was possible: “Whatever king you place upon the throne there is certain to be opposition within a very short time” (Chief Justice Cedercranz, in Samoa Weekly Herald, 16 Dec. 1893; cf. 2 Sept.). In 1895 the chiefs of Tumua issued a peace declaration, combined with a request that Malietoa resign: “The Tumua knows of no chief who would be acceptable to all Samoa. Therefore they ask … that the title of ‘King of Samoa’ be abolished.”37 Tumua asked

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for elections, a provision of the 1889 Berlin Act, and a meeting of Samoan chiefs to decide on a suitable form of government. But Laupepa was ill and new would-be kings were emerging. In 1898 Laupepa died and Mata‘afa returned to Samoa, precipitating the final act of the kingship struggle. Mata‘afa met an enthusiastic welcome from the Tupua family and was proclaimed king by Tumua and Pule, but he was opposed by the Tamasese and Malietoa factions, who supported Laupepa’s eighteen-year-old son Tanumafili (Gilson 1970: 425–7; Moors 1986 [1924]: 115). The Berlin Act provided that the highest legal authority in Samoa was the chief justice of the Supreme Court, and thus it came to pass that an American jurist named William Chambers came to decide the matter of the Samoan kingship in court. As evidence both the Mata‘afa and Tanumafili sides presented versions of custom and tradition. Tanumafili’s lawyers were Edwin Gurr and R.H. Carruthers, old Samoa hands with considerable knowledge of such matters, but Mata‘afa had only a German planter to represent him (Moors 1987 [1924]: 124–5). In the proceedings both Samoans and Europeans invoked indigenous modes of legitimation, such as genealogies and prior political fealty, to promote their candidate’s cause. But arguing the kingship in the context of “Samoan custom” inevitably opened the complex “evidence” to long-standing modes of contesting and challenge through partisan reinterpretation. That Tanumafili won may have been due at least in part to Gurr’s expertise and extensive research into Samoan political matters. In preparing his case Gurr38 marshalled an impressive array of genealogies, legends, and statements by orators, ranging over the fundamental issues in Samoan chiefly politics: the role of the tulāfale, the scope and authority of Tumua and Pule, the meaning and relative rank of pāpā and ao. Gurr used Newell’s work, which characterized Mata‘afa as an ao, a lesser title and, moreover, inferior in rank to Malietoa. Tanumafili claimed to hold the four pāpā, but this assertion was challenged by prominent orators on Mata‘afa’s side, citing “the customs of Samoa” and “Samoan beliefs” (“tū fa‘aSamoa”).39 Tanumafili was vulnerable on the issue of popular support (Moors 1986 [1924]: 115), and an American judge might be expected to take into account democratic ideals. To counter this point Gurr noted that majorities and the popular will have nothing to do with Samoan title decisions. To further undermine Mata‘afa’s credentials Gurr interpreted Tupua genealogies and the dying



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bequests (mavaega) of ancient chiefs to conclude: “Traditionally Mataafa ought not to be Tuiatua.”40 In the end, however, Chambers’s decision in favour of Tanumafili was based not on Samoan political custom but on a legal technicality. After the cultural evidence had been presented, Gurr and Carruthers argued that the protocols of the 1889 Berlin conference made Mata‘afa ineligible for kingship – an argument that Chambers accepted. On the day after the decision Mata‘afa’s forces occupied Apia; Tanumafili and Tamasese took refuge on a British ship in the harbour. The foreign consuls temporarily accepted Mata‘afa’s government but warfare broke out when American and British ships attempted to reinstate Laupepa (Moors 1986 [1924]: 126–52). The next and final international commission on Samoa concluded that the kingship was a concept foreign to Samoan culture and abolished the position (Moors 1986 [1924]: 159–68). Both Tanumafili and Chambers resigned, and the Great Powers developed the scenario for partition. Headed by the culturally astute Governor Wilhelm Solf, the German colonial administration of Western Samoa took a number of steps to forestall a resurgence of factional conflict over the paramount office. In place of the kingship Solf invented the office of Ali‘i sili or “highest chief” and appointed Mata‘afa to it. Solf emphasized repeatedly that the Kaiser was the highest authority over Samoa and the Ali‘i sili was but an underling. “Under all circumstances,” he wrote in his Annual Report, “the transfer of the title Tupu to Mataafa had to be avoided.”41 Not only was this the end of foreign designs for the kingship, but Solf’s long-term strategy for controlling the colony entailed systematically quashing the bases of Samoan national ambition. When the powerful orators raised trouble Solf “abolished” Tumua and Pule and forbade their mention in any ceremonial greeting (Samoanische Zeitung, 19 Aug. 1905). A new, officially authored and sanctioned national fa‘alupega greeting acknowledging the Kaiser (Kaisalika) first, then the Samoan Ali‘i sili, was promulgated instead.

Conclusion: A Structure of Resistance? In this essay I have examined the interaction of Western and indigenous political ideas in post-contact Samoa and have attempted to show how the conjunction of conceptual models played out in Samoan political action. I do not believe that Samoans ever had

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an indigenous “king” in the European sense. The Tafaifā was not a “king,” although it contained the notion of a unified Samoa; “unified” in what way remains unclear. Neither was the Tupu a monarch in its first incarnation, although in the late nineteenth century the term came to denote a Western-supported and, in part, Westernstyled “king.” Accordingly, neither were Tafaifā and Tupu conceptually equivalent or synonymous, though they came to be equated by both Samoans and foreigners in the course of the kingship disputes. Transformations in the meanings of Tafaifā and Tupu illustrate how foreign and indigenous concepts and constructions dynamically interact in contact situations. The vocabulary of “impacts” and “imposed” institutions cannot describe the cultural conjuncture that played out in the Samoan kingship saga. Western interpretations of the indigenous political system influenced Samoan attempts to design a government, as did the monarchical and parliamentary plans that foreigners variously promoted. Throughout, Samoans were not ineffectual recipients of colonial designs but creatively appropriated the Euro-American models presented to them, reinterpreting indigenous concepts in light of those models in order to advance culturally defined goals. Neither were the Samoan “kings” the puppets of foreign masters, but astute political operators attempting to take advantage of new sources of support and legitimation. In Samoan cultural politics the status quo, which Europeans saw as chronic disorder, was one of ongoing contestation between chiefly families. Supra-local ceremonial rank and political precedence had always been disputed in Samoa. The bases and the modes of competing for paramount authority were embedded in Samoan political process, which saw frequent low-level conflicts related to assertions of local autonomy and the protection of the “dignity” (mamalu) of titles, villages, and orator groups. During the kingship dispute the scope of paramount authority was extended in Samoan aspirations as chiefly factions came to pursue a monarchical vision of concentrated, centralized rule over the entire island chain. For their part, Westerners contributed to the efflorescence of Samoan chiefly rivalries by promoting self-interested political goals, and then by playing out their own national rivalries through partisan support of the contenders. Clearly, selective arms sales and military interference by colonial governments fomented the very disorder that foreigners aspired to cure with political engineering. Western interference



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had invidious effects on Samoan affairs, but Samoan intentions and actions were consequential in the denouement of the kingship dispute. My argument is not intended to reduce “the structure of the conjuncture” to the strivings of political agents, however. At a level quite distinct from the power seeking of ambitious individuals and factions, the culture in place affected the historical outcome. A dynamic, agonistic quality of contested decentralization was in the nature of the Samoan chieftainship. This quality brought EuroAmerican citizens and governments into a bitter conflict that, but for the hurricane disaster, seemed destined to escalate into an international war. For most of the nineteenth century, the contested decentralization of the Samoan political structure effectively thwarted the expansive mandate of imperial nation-states. During the past century anthropologists have documented innumerable contact situations in which trade goods and other introduced objects were creatively adopted by indigenous peoples, who situated them in native value schemes, incorporated them into customary exchanges, and variously put them to the service of culturally defined ends (see, e.g., Sahlins 1981a on the Hawaiian chiefs’ sumptuary use of Western goods). The Samoan kingship saga powerfully shows that introduced ideas and institutions, as well as material objects, are creatively interpreted in local settings and deployed in unexpected ways. In sites of foreign contact there is a dialectical interplay between indigenous and introduced ideas and symbolic schemes. Moreover, the kingship dispute is a cautionary tale for our own times, when the stated goal of US foreign policy is to replace authoritarian regimes abroad with our own model of national governance. From accruing and holding strategic territorial possessions, the mandate has shifted to that of aggressively “exporting democracy” to the unenlightened regions of the world.42 The events in nineteenth-century Samoa may appear alien and remote, but the goals and assumptions of the imperial nations during that period are strikingly familiar. In both cases, powerful industrial states decided that a Western governmental model would remedy political chaos in a peripheral place. Like “kingship,” “democracy” is a cultural idea as well as an institution. Like kingship, democracy is reinterpreted, given new meanings, and incorporated into the local scheme of things when it is introduced into a new cultural context. Like kingship, democracy cannot be “exported” without incurring unintended and unpredictable consequences.43

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Acknowledgments This chapter is based primarily on archival and documentary investigations conducted in several collections between 1985 and 1997. A sabbatical from the University of Hawai‘i and a fellowship at Macquarie University in Australia made possible research in the Mitchell Library, Sydney. A grant-in-aid from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research supported research in the National Archives of New Zealand and the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington. A faculty development grant from the University of Hawai‘i funded investigations in the Nelson Memorial Library and the Marist Archives in Apia, (Western) Samoa. I thank all of these institutions for their generous support. For hospitality, patience, and instruction in matters fa‘a-Samoa, I extend my deepest gratitude to the Vaisagote family in Faleū, Manono. I thank John Mayer and Aumua Mata’itusi of the University of Hawai‘i for tutelage in Samoan language, culture, and ceremonial speech. During the long gestation of this essay several friends and colleagues have offered valuable comments and suggestions, including Stewart Firth, Kerry James, Samuel Martínez, Malama Meleiseā, and Caroline Ralston. For the deficiencies of the work, I alone am responsible.

Notes 1 Published sources will be cited in the body of the text, unpublished materials in endnotes. Citations to archival and manuscript sources employ the following abbreviations: ATL, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand; BCS, British Consular Archives, in NANZ; GAP, German Administration Papers (PMB 479); LMS SSL, London Missionary Society archives, South Seas Letters (Box/folder/jacket), microfilms in ML; ML, Mitchell Library, Sydney; MOM, Methodist Overseas Mission archives, in ML; NANZ, National Archives of New Zealand, Wellington; PMB, Pacific Manuscripts Bureau microfilms; SGP, Samoan Government Papers, in NANZ. 2 For the imperial perspective on this history, see Brookes (1941), Ellison (1938), Kennedy (1974), Masterman (1934), and Ryden (1933). Gilson’s history (1970) is regarded as authoritative for placing events within the Samoan cultural context. 3 Sunderland, 27 June 1854, LMS SSL 25/7/D; see also Williams (1832) in Moyle (1984: 238). 4 Letter, 8 Oct. 1835, MOM.



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5 Letter, 16 July 1836, MOM. Missionaries were making similar comments in 1870; cf. Pratt (1870) and Whitmee (1870) – both in LMS. 6 Captain Charles Hope of HBMS “Brisk,” July 1866, BCS 2/1; cf. Dyson (1882: 303); Pratt (1870); C.E. Stevens, Jan. 1876, BCS 7/3. 7 For European understandings and representations of monarchy, see Bloch (1973), Burns (1992), Cannadine (1983), Homans (1998), Le Roy Ladurie (1994). 8 Cf. Gilson (1970: 188), Hanson (1973), Holmes (1980), Marcus (1989), Meleiseā (1987), Sahlins (1958). 9 Erskine (1853: 85), Stevenson (1967 [1892]: 4). Peter Turner, letter of 16 July 1836, MOM; Williams (1832) in Moyle (1984: 238). 10 Robert Louis Stevenson, Samoa’s resident foreign celebrity in the 1890s, eloquently assessed the high chiefs as “a kind of a gagged audience for village orators … the chiefs of Samoa are surfeited with lip-honour, but the seat and extent of their actual authority is hard to find” (1967 [1892]: 4). 11 Ethnohistorical and scholarly sources concur on this point, see, e.g., Ella (1895: 597); Gilson (1970: 425–6); Edwin Gurr papers, ATL, folder 18; C.N.D. Hardie, ms “Diary of Rev. Charles Hardie, 1835–55,” p. 106, ML A368; Meleiseā (1987: 46–62). 12 In Samoan ceremonial greetings (fa‘alupega) and public oratory (lāuga), the local and regional factions that historically supported the holders of a particular chiefly title are referred to as the “families.” 13 There is ample ethnohistorical documentation of violent incidents provoked by insulting language or behaviour, pig stealing, breaches of etiquette, and title disputes, among other causes, see, e.g., Martin Dyson and Joseph King journals, ML; Samoan Reporter (1845–47, passim), in LMS, e.g. In the context of standing animosities between certain districts and localities, seemingly trivial altercations and disputes had the potential to escalate into wider conflicts. 14 Ms., ca. 1879, ML. 15 J.E. Newell papers, “Notes on Samoan customs in reference to Names and Titles,” LMS. 16 M. Dyson, 1863 journal, p 373, ML; A.P. Maudslay, “Memorandum on the State of Samoa,” 20 Oct. 1880, in Great Britain and Ireland Foreign Office Correspondence, F.O. 58/171; J. O’Hea, ms. “Journal of a Voyage to the South Sea Islands in the Eliza K. Bateson Brig,” 1862–63, ML ; Walpole (1849: 351); cf. Davidson (1967: 29). 17 Newell, “Notes on Samoan customs.” 18 My synopsis of the “war of the two Malietoas” is based on missionary George Turner’s manuscript, “The War in Upolu in 1869,” 16 Apr. 1869, LMS SSL, and on Gilson (1970: 259–90), Pratt (1870), and Whitmee (1870).

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19 Whitmee, 31 Aug. 1870, LMS SSL . 20 For the Steinberger affair, see Gilson (1970: 291–331), Ryden (1933: 95–9), Steinberger (1874). 21 Comments in contemporary archival materials include Goward to Seward, in Great Britain and Ireland (1878: 17); J. Mathison 2 Aug. 1876, MOM . 22 J.S. Austin, 10 Oct. 1877, MOM . 23 Maudsley to Gordon, Great Britain and Ireland (1878: 145); Samoa Times, 30 Mar. 1878, p. 2. 24 Gilson (1970: 345–57); A.H. Gordon, Memorandum, 10 May, Great Britain and Ireland (1879: 38). 25 E.g., to British Consul Swanston, 3 June 1879, BCS 2/1. 26 G. Pritchard, “Memo for the Consuls,” 14 Nov. 1879, BCS 2/1. 27 Gilson (1970: 376–82); Jan. 1885 correspondence in BCS 2/5. 28 Dated 19 Jan. 1885, BCS 2/5. 29 Dated 3 Feb. 1885, BCS 2/5. 30 “O le tu e masani ai lo matou nei atunuu.” My translation. 31 Ta’imua and Faipule to Powell, 28 July 1885, BCS 2/5. 32 Dated 18 Aug. 1885, BCS 2/5. 33 J.E. Newell papers, 7 Apr. 1885, LMS . 34 Correspondence in 1888, BCS 2/7; SGP , series 1. 35 Tumua and Pule and Aiga to British Consul Coetlogon 9 Sept. 1888, BCS 2/7. 36 One of his most prominent foreign supporters was Robert Louis Stevenson (1967 [1892]). 37 Dated 13 June 1895, SGP 2/2. 38 Ms papers of Edwin Gurr, ATL . 39 Tumua and Pule and Lauaki et al. to Chambers, 20 Dec. 1898, SGP 2/4. 40 Ms papers, folder 18, ATL . 41 GAP 17/C/7, 1900–1901. 42 For an introduction to the diversity of views on this policy, see Muravchik (1991), Lowenthal (1991), and Wiarda (1986, 1997). 43 Issues raised by the Samoan ethnohistorical investigations led to my current long-term research project, a study of comparative constructions of “democracy” in developing nations, with a focus on Latin America.

Slow Time: The Knowability of the Neolithic

3 Slow Time: Culture, Materiality, and the Knowability of the Neolithic Webb Keane Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time … Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

In its origins, anthropology was a response not only to the colonial encounter with difference, but also to the discovery of deep time (Shryock and Smail 2011, Trautmann 1992). One of the most dangerous consequences of the convergence of global reach and deep time, of course, was to conflate the two, equating others with ancients. Disciplinary self-critique eventually made it obvious that such an equation was hopelessly naive if not outright vicious, or worse. In response, many cultural anthropologists came to confine their claims to the particularity of local knowledge (Geertz 1983). Others moved toward an increasingly narrow focus on the present or very recent past. One outcome of this temporal narrowness has been a lack of perspective even on our own condition, a tendency to attribute to modernity either too much novelty, or none at all. Either all is changed, or it has always been thus. Against this trend, Marshall Sahlins’s work has taken place at both poles of the anthropological project, both its broadest perspective and its most fine-grained ethnographic specificity. It is exemplary in its refusal to insist that one must come at the expense of the other. If “The Original Affluent Society” (1972, first appearing in French, see 1968b) drew on comparisons across a vast range of cases, from

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contemporary ethnography to the archaeology of the Palaeolithic, Islands of History (1985a) argued for the specificity of old Hawai‘i, its incommensurability and irreducibility to terms defined within other worlds. At the same time, Sahlins’s work has given us one of the deepest analyses of the nature of the paradox that makes the comparative project so problematic. The theme is already there in “The Original Affluent Society” and still found in “Cosmologies of Capitalism” (1989b, 1994b) some twenty years later, although perhaps the fullest expression of the argument is developed by Culture and Practical Reason, chronologically midway between them in 1976. The paradox has one source in the way in which culture has been defined in contrast to determinism. Crucial to Sahlins’s understanding of culture is the principle of something that might be called (not, I think, his expression) collective choice. Cultural forms cannot be explained by necessity (e.g., the need for protein) or some mechanical principle of determination (e.g., the inexorable effects of new technologies). They express choices made by communities on the basis of values and goals that themselves cannot be reduced to some pre-existing rationale. Given certain ecological, demographic, and technological circumstances, the prevailing social arrangements, political interests, and cosmological orders could always have turned out other than they did. Cultural forms therefore manifest the fundamentally underdetermined character of human social life, its basic freedom from natural or mechanical determinism. In Sahlins’s later work, one implication of this assertion begins to emerge more clearly: since they are underdetermined, cultures are marked by an irreducible contingency in their very sources: they are inherently historical in nature. If this means they are irreducibly situated in time, we might extrapolate a further conclusion, that they are in some sense oriented to some projected future, even if that future is imagined as a continuation of the past. The retrospective understanding of the observer must not overlook this temporal character of cultural projects: if Cook is Lono, that is, in part, because he must become Lono. Contingent in their pasts, oriented to imagined futures, societies cannot be reduced to either an origin or a destiny. It is because of this principle of choice or relative freedom, that the human sciences cannot be modelled on the natural sciences, an assumption that came to dominate mainstream social and cultural anthropology after the 1960s (see Keane 2005). In the struggle to establish this principle, anthropologists of Sahlins’s generation



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tended to treat the opposition between choice and determinism as inseparable from that between the symbolic and material dimensions of society. That Sahlins’s position has largely won the day is evident in the way it has been taken up by many of those who are methodologically most rooted in the materiality of human worlds, archaeologists. For instance, David Lewis-Williams writes “increasing sedentism, socio-economic competition, climatic change and population increase do not in themselves lead inexorably to agriculture or the domestication of animals” (2004: 29), and Ian Hodder remarks of Grahame Clark approvingly “it was this social choice which, when released from environmental constraint, created the diversity of human culture” (1999: 177). Identifying deterministic explanation with materialism, and social choices with symbolism has had unintended consequences. By rendering the locus of choice in an immaterial domain, culture has effectively been removed from the realm of causality and even phenomenological experience to the extent that it is hard to see how choices could have consequences. Furthermore, if there is no exterior rationale for cultural choices, then there is no general principle by which cultural formations can be explained. Each must be taken on its own terms. Yet if each is taken on its own terms, there is no guarantee that any category of analysis can be legitimately applied across cases. If certain social or cultural forms can be explained by certain determinant conditions, it should in principle be possible to compare either similar forms or similar conditions. Not so if those forms are chosen. Cultures are, in principle, radically incommensurate. Yet the very argument itself rests on the most general kind of claim, that culture is by definition something that exceeds the demands of necessity, and that all humans are cultural, or, put another way, that to be human is to be defined by the principle of choices that go beyond necessity. On what basis can we make such broad claims? Another way of asking this question is this: how can we develop an anthropology that fulfils its original promise of breaking out of our limits in order to know worlds beyond our own? As a preliminary response to this question, I want to turn to an area of anthropology that has never abandoned the perspective of deep time, archaeology. For if cultural worlds are produced by human imaginings, over the very long run, it would be in the deep temporal perspective offered by archaeology that we may begin to get a hold on the way

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in which distinct worlds are constituted. It is because of my interest in these questions about the possibilities for comparison and the effort to overcome our temporal parochialism that in 2006 I agreed to take part in a project that lies dramatically far afield from my own scholarly territory in contemporary Indonesia, and accept an invitation to think about Neolithic religion in Turkey (see Hodder 2010, 2014). In this essay I want to explore the possibilities for comparison and the knowledge of deep time by looking at some questions raised by prehistoric evidence. Why even seek a Neolithic religion? After all, given the nature of the evidence, the chances of giving any demonstrable content to prehistoric religion are vanishingly small (for a review of the major approaches in archaeology, see Fogelin 2007). In the face of this, we may wonder what desire compels so elusive a quest. One element of this desire today seems to be the idea that religion, like culture, is a privileged locus for discovering human freedom from natural determinism and the concomitant ability to create new worlds and the work within realities that extend beyond the immediate here and now of direct experience. This doesn’t require a search for something that will fit the model of contemporary perceptions of religion as faith in something transcendental. Rather, we may recall here a remark of Leslie White’s that, in Sahlins’s words, “no ape … can tell the difference between holy water and distilled water” (Sahlins 2008e: 320). The category of religion, in this view, seems to stand in for, or to apotheosize, a distinctly human principle of constituted realities. Yet even if we provisionally accept this motive, how should we distinguish religion from the more general category of culture? Since the search for Neolithic religion depends, first, on defining religion in terms broad enough that they span the gap between discursively available worlds to the distant, silent, past, we could follow Talal Asad (1993; see also Masuzawa 2005) and cast a politically skeptical eye on the stakes and the interests in even asking for a definition of universal religion; however, that would be a different task (see Keane 2007, esp. chapter 3). For now I want to avoid the temptation to dismiss the question out of hand, since my aim is to keep open the question of deep time. If we accept that some speculation can be a useful way to open up the evidence, we must still be wary of the overwhelming tendency in religious speculation to project the author’s particular desires and preoccupations onto prehistory, prematurely



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eliminating what Hodder has called its “strangeness and ‘otherness’” (2006: 32). And yet, as Charles Sanders Peirce made clear long ago, science should involve a step we might call “a guess at the riddle,” the abduction of likelihoods, if it is not to be mired in narrow empiricism. So we are presented with the question of how to reconcile two demands, that we imagine ways to understand the evidence without foreclosing the possibility that what we are trying to imagine might be radically strange to us. In reviewing the archaeological record, I will suggest that much of what seems to fit received categories of religion lies at one end of a continuum of forms of attention and hierarchies of value that range from relatively unmarked to marked. Prehistory is, perhaps, the limit case for comparison or any knowledge of social and cultural things at all. What can we learn from the mute evidence of things? What can we know about the deep past? What of human creative activities might we draw out from the slow time of still objects? I will argue for a materialist semiotic that restores causality to our understanding of social processes without returning to reductionism, functionalism, or determinism. It does so by attending to the ways on which decisions must be realized materially, and therefore bring about new circumstances not simply as their purposes, but as the necessary pre-conditions demanded by those purposes. A materialist semiotic, combined with a fully social theory of objectification, can help us in rethinking the place of causality in the analysis of society and history.

Çatalhöyük’s Neolithic Çatalhöyük is the site of a Neolithic settlement in central Anatolia that was inhabited from about 7200 to 6200 BCE. By the beginning of this period, the process of sedentization was already well under way in the Middle East. Human sociality had reached at an unprecedented new scale, density, and degree of continuity over time. The domestication of food plants, sheep, and goats had been accomplished, although cattle remained wild. As elsewhere, the Neolithic in Anatolia was marked by a massive increase in the sheer quantity of things made by people, including buildings, pottery, and textiles. For the first time people were spending their daily lives in environments that were largely of human construction or subject to ongoing human manipulation, in towns, agricultural fields, and pastures (Watkins 2004). Rather than ranging widely in accord with the

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season, people’s activities were confined to a more or less bounded territory year round, although the people of Çatalhöyük also participated in some kind of long-distance exchange networks (for a recent summary, see Hodder 2007). Two things in particular have drawn special attention to Çatalhöyük: its architecture and its art. Çatalhöyük is unusual for its large size, with an estimated population between 3,000 and 8,000 (Hodder 2006: 56). It was a densely packed agglomeration of more or less similar rectangular buildings, interspersed with some herding pens (Düring 2001). Most of these houses contained ovens, hearths, food storage bins, pillars, and benches along some walls. In some houses, the dead were buried within the benches. Although the houses were similar in basic structure and size, and remained so for centuries, there are some important variables that distinguish among them. These are the presence or absence of burials, wall paintings, and mouldings (cut-out reliefs, animal sculptures, cattle horns, and other items set into the walls). It is above all these distinguishing elaborations – so-called art – that have made Çatalhöyük famous and have provoked most of the speculations about its inhabitants’ “religion.” Çatalhöyük has yielded the earliest known paintings on human-made surfaces, as opposed to rocks, cave walls, bone, or other natural objects. One of the bestpreserved paintings is commonly said to show large vultures with human feet and small, headless humanlike forms. Others display large animals (a stag, a boar, perhaps an equid) surrounded by numbers of small humans. One depicts what appear to be two cranes facing each other (Russell and McGowan 2003). The rooms’ walls also contain painted plaster reliefs of leopards and bears, and embedded in walls, pillars, and benches are bucrania, the plastered-over skulls and horns of wild cattle, sometimes set in rows, and skulls of fox and weasel. Some walls bore protuberances, within which were hidden the lower jaws of wild boars. Whereas these dramatic forms of elaboration are closely associated with architectural structures, there are also large quantities of tiny, crudely shaped figurines that are typically found in domestic rubbish heaps between houses, although some ended up in oven walls, in house walls, beneath floors, or in abandoned houses. Among these figurines is perhaps the most famous single object from Çatalhöyük, resembling a heavy-set human, apparently a female, her arms resting on two felines. This image helped give rise to the early



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speculations that Çatalhöyük was home to a Mother Goddess cult (Gimbutas 1982, Mellaart 1967; cf. Meskell 1998). Most, however, are more roughly shaped to form vaguely human or animal-like forms, in some cases with detachable heads or showing evidence of having their heads intentionally broken off (Voigt 2000, Nakamura and Meskell 2006, Meskell 2004). A few intriguing patterns are emerging from the data. First, certain kinds of art bear a strong relationship to specific locations within the dwellings, whereas others, notably the figurines, do not. By contrast to the figurines, the relief sculptures and bucrania are integral to the architecture, being embedded in walls, beams, and pillars (Hodder 1999: 188). Relief sculptures seem to have been long-lasting and subject to periodic renewal through replastering. Some evidence even suggests that old bucrania were dug out of older layers of the house to be retrieved for reuse when later houses were built (189). Just as bucrania were plastered, so too were some human skulls, which were, in effect “refleshed” (Hodder 2006: 148). If the reliefs were a more or less permanent feature of the experience of living in the house, and like plaster and whitewash, subject to periodic renewal, this was not apparently the case for paintings. The paintings were plastered over, and seem to have had a short life span, “rare, transient events” (Matthews, Wiles, and Almond 2006: 285). These paintings seem to occur primarily in the “cleaner” parts of the house, away from main food preparation and storage areas (Hodder 1999: 186). The subject matter of the paintings focuses on wild animals, above all, leopard and red deer. These are animals whose actual remains are rare in the settlement, in contrast to those of roe deer and sheep, the most common faunal remains, which are never portrayed in paintings. The buildings themselves range along a continuum from unelaborated to elaborated. A preliminary analysis (Düring 2001: 10–11; see also Düring 2003) found that 20 per cent of buildings have burials and mouldings. Sixty per cent of burials occur in buildings that also have elaborations such as mouldings. Only 20 per cent of buildings have elaborations. Hodder (2006: 50) sees this pattern of oppositions emerging from the data: pottery and utilitarian stone implements versus grave goods; everyday consumption of domesticated animals versus feasting on and portrayal of wild animals; southern part of the house versus northern; undecorated parts of house versus decorated; lower darker, dirtier floors near ovens versus whiter (plastered),

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cleaner floors near burials; and an overarching conclusion that these manifest a contrast between everyday routine and ritual life. In this latter conclusion we see one expression of the general run of interpretations, which takes decoration and art to be “symbolic” and therefore to be evidence of “religion.” This set of oppositions is potentially very productive, and I will draw on it. It can also, however, play into some old categories that may do as much to hinder our understanding as further it.

From “Art” to “Religion” at Çatalhöyük The Neolithic is commonly defined not only in terms of technological developments, plant and animal domestication, and new settlement patterns, but as ushering in a dramatic new degree of elaborateness in the human manipulation of symbols. Çatalhöyük’s art is famous, in part, because it seems to exemplify this new degree of symbolic activity (see Last 1998). Mimetic imagery in particular can promise a certain intimacy, for it seems to allow us to see through the eyes of others, and it is perhaps impossible to resist the feeling expressed by Augustin Holl, that “of all the artifacts left to us in the debris of vanished cultures … artworks bring us closer to their makers than anything else” (2004: 143). And in turn, it is Çatalhöyük’s “art” more than anything else that has inspired the most speculation about its inhabitants’ “religion.” In fact, it often turns out the relationship between art and religion is virtually pre-determined by the way in which the writers have defined them. In both cases, the main diagnostic by which any material remains are identified as art or as evidence of religion is their apparent lack of utility. According to Jacques Cauvin, for example, the symbolic revolution was manifested early through the appearance in Pre-Pottery Neolithic B of flint knapping on bipolar nuclei to produce fine regular blades, and the use of a flat lamellar retouch on blades, which, he says, takes them beyond the requirements of utility (2000: 243). Of the display of bull skulls, he writes: “These devices are obviously symbolic, for very little hunting of the wild bull itself took place” (238). Similarly, Bleda Düring’s (2001) careful analysis of the data on houses at Çatalhöyük shows a regular contrast between clean and dirty areas, an observation confirmed by micro analysis (see Matthews, Wiles, and Almond 2006). From this he draws the conclusion that these are respectively the “symbolically charged” and the domestic areas of



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the house. This pattern of diagnosis is widespread: in the absence of apparent utility, we must be in the presence of the symbolic. Given this definition of the symbolic, it typically follows, according to a distinction familiar in British social anthropology at least since Malinowski, that we are also likely to be in the presence of religion. Although by now it is a tired joke among archaeologists that any artifact whose use is not evident must be “ritual,” this way of defining religion retains its deep appeal. For example, it remains a central component of cognitive anthropologists’ definition of religion: as Harvey Whitehouse writes, “What both ritual and art have in common is their incorporation of elements that are superfluous to any practical aim and, thus, are irreducible to technical motivations” (2004: 3). There are a number of problems with the assumptions these approaches display. First, of course, is the sheer difficulty of accurately identifying a lack of utility. Just as the absence of proof cannot be taken as a proof of absence, so too the investigator’s inability to imagine a use for something may demonstrate nothing more than the limits of his or her imagination – or breadth of ethnographic knowledge. What could be more useless than the study of a “dead” language like Latin? But it is only useless if one does not, say, think it is the actual language of God, has magical powers, or, if one ignores the utility of the social status gained by conspicuous display – matters of semiotic ideology. Or, again, when Constantine placed the Christian labarum sign on his soldiers’ shields, it was not as a useless symbol: he was activating divine power. More important, however, is the effort to isolate “the symbolic” as a distinct domain within the range of empirical observations. This reproduces an invidious dichotomy, in which the symbolic stands apart from – and, by implication, is supplemental to – the truly useful, much as superstructure stood to infrastructure, in the old model. Yet an enduring insight of Sahlins is that the human activities cannot be separated into discrete symbolic and useful domains, for even hunting reflects cultural choices made on the basis of certain values. So we might turn back to Cauvin’s bull skulls: suppose they were displayed by people who regularly ate the animals, would that make their display any less symbolic? It is no doubt significant that the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük portrayed and displayed the skulls of animals they rarely hunted and that were not their primary sources of food. And this pattern does

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suggest that such animals were foci of particular kinds of attentiveness and interest. It does not follow from this that the display of bucrania is peculiarly symbolic in ways that the making of pottery, harvesting of lentils, or the marrying of cousins are not. Nor is this evidence that wild animals are somehow more symbolic than domesticated ones. People of Sumba, where I have lived (Keane 1997, 2007), can talk endlessly about the qualities of cattle and the wealth, powers in exchange relations, and thus, by hypothesis, ancestral blessings they manifest. This interest in itself makes them neither more nor less useful than deer, dogs, and chickens. This isolation of the symbolic from the instrumental has consequences for how one thinks of religion, as a priori a distinct sphere apart from supposedly everyday activity. I stress this point both because of the bearing it has on the specific problem of interpreting evidence for prehistoric religion, and because it reveals one set of consequences that follow from defining culture as a domain that manifests a principle of (relative) human freedom from natural determinism. If culture is defined as being the domain of social choices, in contrast to necessity, the domain of natural determinism, then things that seem to reflect a lack of necessity are, ipso facto, cultural. The cultural, in this pattern, is a general principle whose specific manifestations are those things called symbolic. To separate the archaeological evidence into things that are useful and those that are symbolic implies that the practical side of human activity is not symbolic. This point is important because other analytical consequences follow. The putative distinction between instrumental and symbolic is the basis on which most of the theories of religion in Çatalhöyük have been based. A second problematic feature of the common ways of talking about the symbolic follows from the first. If one identifies necessity with the material world of cause and effect, then it often follows that culture will be identified with immaterial ideas. To the extent that the symbolic is an autonomous domain and identifiable with a certain class of non-instrumental objects, then those objects themselves have a distinctive relationship to the world of thought and activity. That relationship is typically one of representation: the material object expresses, and is logically secondary to, the idea that gave rise to it. Carolyn Nakamura and Lynn Meskell (2006: 229) summarize the main principled objection to the very idea of representation in the context of archaeological artifacts quite well:



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The notion of representation entails a remove from the real, it depicts a likeness, rendition or perception rather than the immediacy of the object in question … By employing the notion of representation we infer that figurines stand in for something real and are a reflection of that reality, of someone or something. And yet these objects are not necessarily referent for something else tangible, but could be experienced as real and tangible things in themselves. The point does not just hold for the distant world of the Neolithic. As Hans Belting (1994) has argued, early Christian icons functioned to make divinity present, not to depict it; in India, the image of a god can be that gaze to which the worshipper makes himself or herself visible (Davis 1997, Pinney 2004; cf. Morgan 2005). And, in Alfred Gell’s (1998) view, many visual experiences function to dazzle or trap the viewer. Finally, some visual images, such as Navaho sand paintings or Walbiri drawings are best understood as the outcomes of the processes by which they were created, and eventually destroyed, rather than as things to be looked at. Even an image that is meant to be viewed by a spectator presupposes significant material conditions. To treat artifacts, or even pictures, as representations is to look beyond their fundamental materiality and all that makes it possible – from motor and cognitive skills to the availability of resources – and that follows from it.

Representations of Religion Despite the critique of representation, discussions of prehistoric religion at Çatalhöyük still tend to treat material objects as representing ideas, and reveal some of the analytical consequences. Cauvin, for instance, pays special attention to the bull horns embedded in the walls and to what he takes to be females carved in stone and moulded in clay. From these he concludes: “These two figures, the woman and the bull, were destined to represent the divine couple, the mother-goddess and bull-god, which were to persist in the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean from the Neolithic until the classic period” (2000: 238). There are good reasons to be wary of this reading and its bold leap across millennia. What I want to stress here is how the concept of representation induces Cauvin to see them as related, rather than saying anything about their form,

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means of production, location, or evidence of treatment. They form a complex because they are both representations. Much of his subsequent interpretation depends on this initial step of grouping them together as a complex. Cauvin takes the horns and figurines to stand for something other than themselves, a bull deity and goddess, respectively. In the case of figurines and paintings – but not that of horns embedded in walls – the basic phenomenology of human visual experience no doubt justifies a mimetic or iconic interpretation: there is at least resemblance to something else. Does iconicity, however, warrant the next step, to representation, and from there to concept? Without some access to the discursive regimentation and semiotic ideologies that guide any culture of image-making and -using, this step from object to idea is hard to justify. The representational approach to material evidence plays an especially important role in the major cognitivist interpretations of Çatalhöyük religion. This is perhaps not surprising, given the two foundational premises of this approach. One, already mentioned, is that religion, like art, is defined in opposition to practicality. The second is that religion consists primarily of beliefs. It follows from this that material objects, like practices, are derivative of those beliefs. The task, then, is how to get from the object to the belief. For Mithen (1998), this means taking the paintings of Çatalhöyük as directly mimetic depictions of beings that form the content of people’s beliefs. His analysis of certain images as metaphorical combinations of elements from different cognitive domains depends on the initial assumption that material things are expressions of ideas. A similar representational approach to the evidence from Çatalhöyük is given by Trevor Watkins (2004). He describes the transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic as a shift in balance between nature and culture, in which people “devised means of embodying abstract concepts, beliefs and ideas about themselves and their world in externalized, permanent forms” (97). In both cases, the special interest in cognition leads Mithen and Watkins to treat material things as evidence for immaterial concepts. There is certainly nothing wrong with this as an analytical strategy. Yet the temptation arises to treat them as substitutes for the discourses we lack, as if images were the texts that would speak to us from the silence of the objects around them. This becomes problematic when it also leads us to assume that things function in order to express concepts.



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Ideas leave material traces only to the extent they take the form of activities. This point is not merely a methodological scruple. It may be a more realistic way to think about even mental life, as it is lived within society. Once we try to look past the things, in our effort to get at ideas, their materiality ceases to be informative. Nevertheless, that materiality is crucial to their place within social life – just not as a determinant. It is as material things that pictures and figurines, houses and burials form contexts, have causes and effects, are publicly available to other people, have histories. These are characteristically left out of representational approaches. And it is here that a materialist semiotics might begin to look.

Wild Animals, Killers, and Meat Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

The period of the Neolithic in which Çatalhöyük thrived was at a tipping point in the processes of domestication. I do not mean this in the teleological sense that history has directionality, with the fallacy that results from assuming people in Çatalhöyük somehow knew where they were heading. Rather, the sense of a tipping point may have taken the form of people’s sharpened awareness of contrasts that they found interesting. In the local political economy, foraging was giving way to agriculture, and hunting to herding. The predominant faunal remains at Çatalhöyük come from domesticated animals like sheep and goats, and the implication is these were the primary sources of meat. Yet the buildings contain bucrania from wild bulls and depictions of bulls, deer, leopards, and equines. Moreover, there is evidence of occasional feasting on some (but not all) of these large wild animals. Taken together, this suggests that wild animals had some grip over people’s imagination. No doubt hunting held power over the imagination for Paleolithic hunters as well. What is important at Çatalhöyük is that it now formed a contrast to animals that are not hunted. After all, sheep and goats were also killed and eaten, so neither the fact of killing nor eating distinguishes the bulls and deer. In this semiotic economy, deer and bulls were not only

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things that humans kill and eat, they were also animals that were not domesticated. The wild and domesticated contrast seems not just to be an opposition that we, the observers, impose on the people of Çatalhöyük, but rather an approximation of a focus of attention and interest of their own that seems to be emerging from the material remains. Some observers take the remains of bulls and the depictions of leopards as evidence that violence played a central role in Çatalhöyük religion. The category of violence is excessively capacious, however, and encompasses everything from the excited sadism of bear baiter or lynch mob to the indifference of the butcher or the hitman. Those who obtain meat themselves rather than from the market, and those who have never formed relations with pets, may not see the killing of animals to be violence at all. Here I will draw, cautiously, on the slaughter of buffalo in contemporary Sumba, not as an analogy – there are far too many differences of context – but as a provocation to the imagination. First, unlike aurochs but like the sheep and goats of Çatalhöyük, Sumbanese buffalo are domesticated, and some myths suggest they are actually held in contempt for having surrendered their powers of speech along with their autonomy in return for the ease of life in the corral (Hoskins 1993). Second, Sumbanese buffalo killing takes place at the apex of a hierarchy of sacrificial value that also includes offerings of betel nut and the killing of chickens, pigs, and horses. It is a hierarchy that reflects a number of things, one of which is the kind of labour, the extent of kinship ties, and the powers of exchange relations that are concretized in the very existence of the animal in the first place (see Keane 1997, chapter 3). Third, what ritual specialists consider the most important elements of these sacrifices leave no material traces: the act is framed by spoken prayers, and the response of the spirits must be sought through divinatory reading of the entrails of the victim. When I lived on Sumba, chicken sacrifice was far more common than that of larger animals, but the act of killing chickens elicited little interest. The killing of small and weak animals not only lacks drama, it offers little opportunity for spectatorship. Buffalo slaughter, on the other hand, is a hugely popular spectacle. It takes place in the village plaza, and everyone who is able to watch does so with great enthusiasm. What is that enthusiasm about? To start, there is a certain thrill in the sheer display of wealth and its expenditure.



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The killing produces huge quantities of meat, which people anticipate with enormous relish. Many spectators focus on the bravado of the young men who undertake the killing, and the risk at which this places them. And people seem to find the fatal blow of the machete and the struggles of the buffalo to be fascinating. What do Sumbanese see in the spectacle? Power, domination, fear, the display of athleticism, identification with or a vast sense of distance from the victim, sadism or empathy, excitement at the dramatic movements, and amusement at the occasional slapstick may all be involved. Janet Hoskins points out that Sumbanese often laugh at the sight of the slaughter. She says this is a nervous response to their ambivalence and suggests they are identifying with the animal but also ridiculing it for allowing them to humiliate it. In her view, the killing works in part to externalize aspects of themselves that they want to eliminate. The slaughter of buffalo also results in their internalization as meat. Sumbanese love to eat meat, but do so only at ceremonial feasts. These bodily pleasures are inseparable from the giving and receiving they presuppose, the commensality and reciprocity. Confronted with evidence of killing, we cannot be sure that violence is the principal focus of attention, or even fear and pain, sadism or empathy. It may also be mere excitement, in which the spectacle of killing is inseparable from the stimulation of being in a crowd – even a Durkheimian collective effervescence – and the anticipation of the feast. So if Sumbanese objectify themselves in the form of the sacrificial animal, they also absorb that objectified beast into themselves in the form of dead flesh. They internalize the meat that results, and they are very aware of the pleasures of satiety and renewed vigour this produces. The dead body of the animal becomes part of the revitalized living body of the feasters; the animal rendered an object of human actions contributes to their constitution as subjects both through the agency by which they kill the beast and through the act of consumption by which they appropriate it to themselves. Perhaps what we can say is this is a kind of objectification, an externalization of an aspect of oneself, at the same time that it is a subjectification of the object world. The objectification process leaves traces not just in the bodies of the eater, but in their houses. Thus the mandibles and horns are indexical icons of accumulated events of feasting (Keane 1997; see

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also Adams 2005, Hodder 2005). It is important to observe the complementary distribution between representations and the major sources of food. Sheep and goats may be good to eat but they are not good to display. They are the essential objectification of human agency, and yet they do not stand for it in the most marked contexts. It may not just be the danger and violence of wild animals that is interesting about them, but the way in which they live at the very edges of human control: we can kill them, yet nothing is guaranteed. The fully domesticated animal, on the other hand, is too thoroughly subjected. The house bears the marks of certain killings, those of bulls, and not others. Faced with such ethnographic comparisons, which of course could be multiplied endlessly, we can’t be sure of the meaning of violence, or indeed, if violence really is the point (see Bloch 1992). We have evidence that people at Çatalhöyük were interested in wild animals. We can surmise it is the wildness of leopards, bulls, and deer, in contrast to the domesticated herds that intrigued them. We have evidence of feasting, and perhaps the spectacle of killing. In the latter, however, we cannot know if the dominant key is fear, pain, prowess, sadism, domination, the thrill of the crowd, and/or the pleasures of the feast. The category of “violence” is both too general and too narrow. There is yet another aspect of killing to consider as well. As Valerio Valeri (1985) observed, killing dramatizes the ubiquitous experience of transformation or transition from presence to absence, writing that “sacrificial death and destruction are also images; they represent the passage from the visible to the invisible and thereby make it possible to conceive the transformations the sacrifice is supposed to produce” (69). This is borne out in the case of Sumbanese killing, which is meant as a bridge to the invisible world. Sacrificial animals convey messages between the manifest world of the living and the invisible world of the dead. In Sumba, sacrificial killing must always include words, and the reading of entrails. These foreground the fact that the killing is a transition between perceptible and imperceptible worlds (see Keane 2009). Forms of communication such as these would leave no archaeological traces. Nevertheless, the evidence at Çatalhöyük suggests people had some interest in the play of visible and invisible, presence and absence. This, at least, is one way of thinking about the mandibles hidden in the walls, the plastering over of paintings, and the corpses



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interred in the benches, invisible presences of which it is reasonable to assume at least some people were aware. Perhaps we do not have to decide which aspect of killing feasting is the key one. These aspects are all bundled together (see Keane 2003). All components of this bundle of features (wealth, social power, domination over the wild, youthful folly, masculine bravado, plentitude and the feelings of meaty satiation, aggression, fear, transition from visible to invisible, from living animal to dead meat, and incorporation of edible object into vital subject) are in principle available for attention, elaboration, and development. Different components of this bundle may come into play in different circumstances; some that were only latent in one context may become prominent in another.

Toward a Materialist Semiotic Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

It may well be that all human worlds require the imagining of entities and even agents that lie beyond perceptible experience – the mere existence of kinship systems already seems to require relations with people at a distance from one’s immediate sensory range, and usually, with dead and future generations (see Kopytoff 1971). This does not, however, require a leap into transcendentalizing faiths; nor does it give us licence to imagine any society ever lived in some simple mystical unity with the spirit world. Rather, we should expect to find marked and unmarked components of existence, some subject to greater attention, circumspection, and discursive elaboration than others. Near the more marked end of this continuum, the conditions for the exercise of people’s powers and social relations come to the foreground, objectified as the outcome of the processes by which they have been materialized. In objectified form, human and animal (and whatever other kinds of agency might be taken to exist) take public form, available for people’s perceptions and subject to their moral evaluations. In such marked and unmarked distinctions as that between domesticated and wild, unelaborated house and elaborated, seem to indicate where we will find hierarchies of value, and there may be where the projects or fears that give content to

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what we like to call “religion” are to be found. If this sounds like a call to return to structuralist oppositions, there is an important difference: these are not merely thought worlds alone and they are not expressed through arbitrary signs. The conditions of materiality play a crucial role in their meaning, social consequences, and historical character. I began by asking what might allow cultural anthropologists to think comparatively and, in particular, to restore the perspective afforded by the encounter with deep time. It will not come simply from reviving the old categories on which comparison once rested. These have been laid low not just by political critique but by the more abstract thesis that the social formations are products of choices and are therefore irreducibly historical and particular in character. Yet if the result is to conclude we can seek no more than local knowledge, we lose a vital perspective. One response has been the effort to revive universals of thought. One of the most self-confident of these revivals is the new evolutionism in cognitive anthropology. This is not the place to address this approach; I do, however, want here to consider one problem it faces, that of material evidence. For archaeologists, of course, the silence of things makes a virtue of the necessary focus on materiality. Moreover, such a focus can be useful on more general grounds. The argument between determinism and cultural choice in the 1960s and 1970s tended to reproduce a dichotomy between materialism and idealism. One result was that materiality came to be identified with reductive determinism. To the extent that culture was identified with ideas, the material dimensions of social existence were commonly treated as not much more than expressions of those immaterial concepts and categories. This was reinforced within the structuralist tradition by the doctrine of the arbitrariness of the sign: nothing about the material qualities of cultural signs, or the causal circumstances in which we find them, contributed to their meaning apart from their capacity to distinguish one sign from another. Materiality was identified with the domain of necessity, ideas with that of freedom. Although the debates have moved on, these dichotomous tendencies persist. A materialist semiotics places signs within the material world – not, however, by restoring determinism (for the use of semiotics in archaeology, see Preucel 2006). To understand this, consider the idea of indexicality. Most archaeological evidence is indexical in character. That means we understand it with reference to an actual



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world of causes and effects. Ashes are indexical of ancient fires, scarred faunal remains of ancient slaughters. Indexicality has two important distinctive characteristics. In the first place, using the language of Peircean semiotics, it is a “Second.” That means, in itself, an index is evidence of something that actually happened. It is neither a mere possibility (as a picture can resemble a non-existent creature like a unicorn) nor a rule (as a spoken sentence is one instance of an indefinitely repeatable linguistic structure). Any given index is a singularity: these ashes index the particular fire that produced them. The second characteristic of indexicality follows from this: indexes are underdetermined for significance. An index cannot in itself specify what it is indexical of. That requires some further inference. To the extent those inferences are coherent and repeatable across instances, relatively predictable, this is because they are organized by a meta-level of semiosis, a Third, that is, a rule for interpreting them. Commonly this meta-indexical framing of indexical signs is found in discourse: but prehistorical materials lack evidence of discourse. One result of the lack of meta-level guidance to indexical evidence is that it is very difficult to determine the difference between the contingent outcomes of actions and the goals of actions. It is common to interpret the visual experience of the wall paintings in Çatalhöyük as being a purpose of the painters’ activities. The assumption is that their creators were producing images so that they could be seen later. Yet this is not necessarily the case. We know from examples such as Navaho sand painting (Newcomb and Reichard 1937) and various kinds of Aboriginal design (Munn 1973) that the process of making the image may be the point, and the resulting image may quickly be destroyed. In Çatalhöyük, the paintings may have been plastered over, and the handprints might be the results of some activity in which painted hands are placed on the wall. If we cannot know for sure whether the evidence is indexical of a purpose, what can we know? First, indexicals are socially significant if they are produced in relation to Thirds of some sort. The most obvious example is sinsigns of a legisign, that is, tokens of types, such as linguistic signs (a word, as a singular, concrete, utterance – what I hear in a given moment of speech – instantiates an abstract linguistic entity). Since a Third is virtual, a rule for use, the task is to seek evidence for a rule. Yet in a sense we needn’t seek out the cognitive correlates: we can seek the kinds of repetition that

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seem to treat indexicals as knowable – not to us, but to those who respond to them in further acts. Here the multi-generational pattern of floor plastering and figurine production at Çatalhöyük may be much more significant than dramatic but singular artifacts like the famous “mother goddess” statue. In seeking out repetition, however, we should not imagine we are finding the instantiation of a rule. As Wittgenstein (1953) pointed out long ago, the idea of following a rule poses extraordinary difficulties – a point that Bourdieu (1977), among others, elaborated for ethnographic analysis. Systems of legisigns may perhaps be better understood as emergent modes of reflection upon specific, perceptible events. The reflections offer retrospective abductions that take actual events to have been, after all, sinsigns, that is, instances of what are only in hindsight seen as their governing principles. (This, I think, is one way to generalize Marshall Sahlins’s arguments in Islands of History.) Second, of any evidence we should seek out the conditions for the possibility of producing it. As Hodder (2006: 60) points out, to plaster the walls of a house required marl extraction plots, tools for digging, containers to carry the mud, and some kind of division of labour and allocation of time. Somewhat more speculatively he surmises the latter conditions would also have meant ways of gathering and organizing people, feasts, and the killing of animals. Hodder calls this “a network of entanglement.” One important aspect of this is that material entanglements produce and are produced by social ones. Although the usual view of the social division of labour is that it makes people depend on one another, we might also see the material artifacts this labour involves as making possible a distribution of agency across a social field. The materialization of human activity makes it public and extends the activities of some people into those of others. Religious activity just like any other enters into the experiences of other people first by virtue of its materiality. People do not have direct access to ideas, but to words, actions, and things. They respond to these material mediations not just by decoding them to get at ideas, but also realize the possibilities they afford in all sorts of ways. They recognize something in their material circumstances, yet given the excess of qualitative and practical possibilities those circumstances afford, what they recognize is underdetermined. To draw on examples closer to home: what was heartfelt prayer for Aquinas became monstrous babble to Luther; a devotional offering by Bach is high art to most modern audiences (see Keane 2007).



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The material outcomes of people’s activities make it possible for other people to treat them as indexical, drawing inferences about what made them possible. If people do in fact draw such inferences (and whether and how they do so is a matter of particular semiotic ideologies), the material objects enter into semiotic economy, and with the result that their meaningfulness is part of a causal logic. For instance, the presence of plastered walls allows the inference that people had been organized to do the work, just as the presence of bucrania might index past feasts and that of fine obsidian access to distant resources. It is important, however, to observe that such potential interpretations are not necessarily ever realized; nor are they necessarily any guide for future actions. The conditions of possibility are only conditions, not goals. And, as Sahlins warned long ago, there is no reason to assume they are based on some particular set of utilitarian judgments or practical reasons that would be obvious to us. We must be wary of the pressure to teleological thinking. The hunt cannot be quite the same when there are also domesticated herds, neither at the level of meaning (because now hunting stands in conceptual contrast to herding) nor practice (time and energy spent hunting could have been used for making pots, flaking obsidian, cultivating fields, telling myths, negotiating marriages, and so forth). The outcome of the hunt objectifies these possibilities. That does not necessarily mean that objectification is in itself meaningful, in the sense that it gives rise to concepts. But once objectified, an activity or artifact is available for meaningfulness and for moral evaluation, as an object for an acting and thinking subject. A more useful distinction than that between symbolic and practical or material would be that among degrees of markedness of attention: objectification is one way to mark out certain parts of experience for special attention, vis-à-vis its relationship to human subjectivity and agency. Artifacts are potentially indexical since they bear the traces of the actions of those who made them. Confronted with those artifacts, people may not necessarily recognize that agency, or take it to be interesting. Conversely, they may also impute agency to objects we might consider “natural” in origin – rocks may speak, for instance (Urban 1996). Nevertheless, to the extent that they do draw inferences about agency from the artifacts around them, those objects are indispensable media by which agency comes to be dispersed or distributed, and thus, by which discrete actions in the past may become part of social worlds in the present. This may be

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the case for a house, a wall painting, even a herd of domesticated sheep, and it holds true regardless of either explicit meanings or their apparent utility. A materialist semiotics seeks out the logical-causal nexus behind objectification, and not just the causes or effects, mental or sociological, of that nexus. That means taking causality as one possible but not necessary source of the potential meaningfulness of the objectification. A materialist semiotics does not assume that any particular social arrangement is either caused by or leads to any particular set of material circumstances. It does, however, take seriously two aspects of the materiality of social life. First, all social action is mediated in some material form and is therefore subject to causality, to unintended consequences, to history. Second, all human experience is in part a response to the experience of material forms that, at least since the Neolithic, were created by previous human actions, which form part of their context: however private the initial impulse behind an action, its materiality gives it an inevitably social character. If cultural life entails choices, and those choices are primarily conceptual in nature, then our access to the deep past will be extremely limited. If, however, those choices always take material form, respond to material contexts, and open up new material possibilities, then they enter into causal worlds in ways that may allow us some purchase on them as elements of causal logics. Local knowledge is not just a system of conceptual categories; it is also a way into the nexus of causes and logics whose particular conjunctions are never generalizable – for one thing, they remain subject to both retrospective abductions and the prospective cast of human projects – yet whose materiality opens up the possibility for comparison across cases. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Ian Hodder for inviting me to join the Templeton Çatalhöyük project, to Maurice Bloch, Lynn Meskell, Peter Pels, Andrew Shryock, Leron Shults, Harvey Whitehouse, and Norm Yoffee for their input, and especially to Marshall Sahlins for encouraging anthropologists to think big. Parts of this essay appeared in different form in Keane (2010).

4 From Jew to Roman: Mr Joske, Mr Brewster, The Hill Tribes of Fiji, and the Hill Tribes of Fiji Martha Kaplan Primary Sources. Many of the main authorities are also significant actors in the events they relate, in one way or another authorized to represent the structures in play … [A]t least as important as the supposed “biases” introduced by the particular interests of the journalists is the fact that their interests and biases are constitutive of what they are talking about. For an ethnographic history, the so-called distortions of firsthand observers and participants are more usefully taken as values than as errors. They represent the cultural forces in play. Kirch and Sahlins, Anahulu

Most scholars of Fiji are familiar with Adolph Brewster Joske, British colonial official, amateur anthropologist, and memoirist, through his books The Hill Tribes of Fiji and The King of the Cannibal Isles, books published in 1922 and 1937, respectively. By the time he published these works, he had retired to England (in 1910) and changed his name to A.B. Brewster. Some Fiji scholars have also read his copious administrative correspondence and reports, held at the Fiji National Archives and the Fiji Museum. For information on the cultural lives and political fortunes of the people of the highlands of Viti Levu, Fiji, The Hill Tribes, in particular, is an invaluable source. It is also, as Marshall Sahlins (Kirch and Sahlins 1992) reminds us, a source on

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the cultural lives and ambitions of Victorian colonial officials, and a guide to the cultural forces in play. This essay on Mr Joske and the hill tribes of Viti Levu, Fiji, moves between an analysis of his ethnography and memoir as colonial discourse and an analysis of the Fijian history-making into which his colonial project fell. We will see Mr Joske as an agent of colonial power and as a complex person enmeshed in colonial contradictions of Fiji and beyond. We will meet his most interesting Fijian contemporary and foil, Mosese Dukumoi (also known as Navosavakadua), the prophet leader of many of the hill tribes. To do this, we will read Mr Joske’s The Hill Tribes of Fiji in two ways: first, as a text of its time, which tells us much about Mr Joske, colonial Fiji, and the global British Empire; and, second, as a source of information about the hill tribes of Fiji, one among many sources about a dynamic history of hinterland Fijians in the era of Navosavakadua. From the work of Marshall Sahlins this consideration of the force of Mr Joske’s texts in the midst of Fijian colonial history draws its focus on the relation of culture, historicity, and power. When anthropology took a historical turn in the 1970s and 1980s, we can see three quite distinct senses of what history meant for the study of culture and what culture meant for the study of power. For world system theorists, led by Eric Wolf, culture required to be contextualized analytically within regional and global inter-relations, especially of European colonialism and capitalism. The dynamism of the situation was political-economic, whether involving the largely European structures of colonialism and exploitation or the local forms of resistance. Culture was situated within power, not the source of it, and power and history-making were understood in political-economic terms. In a more nuanced way, for anthropologists of colonial discourse, from Talal Asad (1974) to Bernard Cohn (1987, 1996) the goal was to denaturalize and analyze colonial projects, finding the powers in their discursive forms. In the work of Sahlins, however, the historical turn was to show the power and history in all cultures. Sahlins’s historical anthropology focuses especially on non-Western histories, the historical agencies of imagined cold societies, to consider the way culture(s) make histories. He locates power in all culture (all cultures), but does not specify in advance the forms that power may take, nor the circumstances that may evoke it. This essay does not seek to illustrate different historicities of British and Fijian structures. It does seek to illustrate two culturally contextualized



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individual histories: histories of two self-understood lawgivers in the hills of Fiji at the end of the nineteenth century. Taking The Hill Tribes as colonial text we can read it as a chronicle of colonial self- transformation. It is by now a truism to observe of colonial societies that colonial elites are not necessarily the elites of the metropole. In Fiji at the turn of the century, A.B. Joske transformed himself from merchant of dubious background to pillar of Empire, from Adolph Brewster Joske to A.B. Brewster, what I would partly playfully describe as a self-transformation from Jew to Roman. His media were written narratives and imagery: official minute papers, amateur anthropological texts, and photographs. His portrayal of Fijians was detailed, curious, and often empathetic, but to image his self as staunch colonial, he needed contrasting images of disorderly Fijian and Indian others. He created vivid portraits with word and camera of dark bilious charlatan prophets, fisher maidens, cannibal kings, excellent cooks, and of himself as Commissioner and Magistrate. An extremely self-conscious lawgiver, Joske/ Brewster used Fijians (and occasionally Indians) and the spectre of their disorder to transform his own colonial social identity. Crucial to the effects of his gaze, both on himself and on the Fijians, was the audience receiving his report: other Fiji whites and the British at home. Joske could gaze, but not just as he pleased. Thinking about the hill tribes of Fiji as they made history in terms their own and new, given, and innovative, we can consider other selftransformations ongoing. When Mr Joske arrived in Fiji and in the hills of Viti Levu, he arrived into a complex cosmological and historical social landscape. As Sahlins has shown (1985a), nineteenthcentury Fijian culture was organized, pervasively, by an opposition between socio-cosmological principles of sea and land. Founding chiefs were understood culturally as sea people, originally strangerkings who married women of the land, founding the lines of chiefs of the great coastal kingdoms. Ritual experts and commoners were constructed culturally as people of the land. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the coasts of Viti Levu and in the Fijian islands to the east, Fiji was organized in hierarchical chiefly-led kingdoms that were in constant relations of alliance, exchange, and contest with each other and with the kingdom of Tonga to the east. The social acts of chiefs became total social facts of a particular (heroic history) kind, not merely charismatic or providers of “models for” the behaviour of followers, but directly constitutive of the relations

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of their polity. If a Bauan chief married into the lineage of Rewa, for example, then his whole polity was related to Rewa with implications from exchange rights to military duties (and of course the histories of actual kinship set the likelihood, though not the inevitability, of such a marriage in the first place). From the 1840s on, Christian missionaries and early white settlers brought their own projects, but were integrated into chiefly-political aims. By 1854, Fiji became Christian (or at least coastal Fiji and the islands became Christian) when Cakobau of the powerful kingdom of Bau converted (Sahlins 1985a: 37). By the time of cession to Britain in 1874, Cakobau was acknowledged by most coastal Fijians and by white observers as the king of Fiji. He and fourteen other chiefs signed the Deed of Cession that made Fiji a British colony. Chiefs made history in Fiji, through the process Sahlins has called heroic history. But the hill peoples of Viti Levu were quintessential people of the land. They organized themselves differently, into relatively smaller, far less hierarchical polities (Kaplan 1995). Most importantly, those in Viti Levu island’s North East understood themselves in relation to their construction of the place where they lived: in and adjacent to the Nakauvadra Mountain Range, home of extraordinarily powerful Fijian ancestor gods. Indeed, we know of this in part because of Mr Joske’s Hill Tribes. The hill people were the pre-eminent “people of the land” more often led by oracle priests and invulnerable warriors than by chiefs (Kaplan 1990a, 1990b, 1995). It is Mr Joske who describes practices such as “luveniwai,” an invulnerability ritual led by ritual officiants, and later “Tuka” practices offering immortality to its warrior adherents. Most importantly in Mr Joske’s era, the “Tuka” leader, a man called Mosese Dukumoi, also known as Navosavakadua, linked Fijian gods with Christian Old and New Testament versions of God (hence the biblical name of “Mosese”) to authorize his leadership of a new form of Fijian polity. Colonial texts such as Mr Joske’s administrative and ethnographic writings, reified Navosavakadua’s “Tuka movement,” as it became known and as they sought to suppress it, never recognizing its basis in the authority of people of the land. In this complex era, Navosavakadua was a Fijian lawgiver challenging new Christian, colonial, and coastal Fijian forms of order. He was, throughout, Mr Joske’s bête noire. In this chapter we will read Mr Joske’s texts as if looking over his shoulder, to envision aspects of the culture of the Fijians he describes, and we will also read them to get at the categories in the



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cosmology of an amiable imperialist. But there’s more to it still. Mr Joske’s texts don’t just express a world created full. They are the very way in which he made his world full. So, this is a story about Mr Joske’s life and writings that focuses on the making of a colonial self, where writing was a crucial activity.1 Mr Joske was in some ways a man in a world furnished by Kipling, but he was also a man seeking to set his place in that world by participating in its construction. He found, as we shall see, “good language” (Dening 1992) via Kipling that helped him to make his place in Victorian Fiji. Thus, we contrast Mr Joske’s agency on the periphery of the British Empire with that on the periphery of Fiji’s heroic history that Joske (as Brewster) so vividly (if sometimes opaquely) chronicled. Thereby we will understand a bit more about powers, specifically powers of agency, enabled by particular kinds of authorship with entailed forms of authority and position in British colonial culture. In this sense we can see Mr Joske’s life as a self-transformation from Jew to Roman, enacted through the imaging of otherness. And at the same time, if we are to use Mr Joske’s writing to look over his shoulder, then we can work to see more than he himself saw, we can work to see Sahlins’s “cultural forces in play.” Thus, this is a study that also thinks about how Mr Joske’s self-fashioning met a certain Fijian leader’s self-fashioning in the hills of Viti Levu. I have come to appreciate the ways in which Mr Joske’s “interests and biases are constitutive of what he is talking about” (Kirch and Sahlins 1992: 4). As his biography intersects with that of the Fijian prophet-leader Navosavakadua, the Victorian and Fijian cultural forces in play will generate a remade Mr Brewster, an enduringly famous Fijian prophet, and in the cultural conjunction between them, including relations and refractions of perception that contingently connect them, an ethnographic and historical reification of danger and disaffection in the hills of Viti Levu that will endure in Fijian experience, colonial law, and scholarly analysis.

Mr Joske’s World Created Full My first working title for this essay was “Mr Joske’s World Created Full.” I borrowed the term “world created full” from Michael Ryan (1981: 532) who tells us of sixteenth-century Europeans, encountering exotic others in the New World, who did not believe that they were discovering unknown lands and new cultures, but thought

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instead that they were confirming the existence of places and peoples already known from the Bible, existing in the Christian God’s world created full. In the case of A.B. Joske, it seemed to me that his texts situated Fiji in an empire already furnished. On the one hand, Mr Joske’s Fiji is often simply furnished by Kipling. Kipling is quoted for the first time (of dozens of citations in this work) on page 45 of The Hill Tribes, as Joske describes the flame-coloured flowering myrtle on the slopes of Mount Victoria, behind Nadarivatu, where he was stationed. “Their kindred grow, also in New Zealand, of which the omniscient Kipling sings in his Ballad of the Flowers … of the blood red myrtle-bloom.” “Never, to my knowledge,” Joske writes, “did the poet visit Fiji, yet the above is a perfect description.” However, it is not Kipling’s landscape that Joske uses most often, but rather Kipling’s characters and characterizations. And especially it is the Kipling of Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies that Joske brings to his writing of Fiji. Here Fiji is a place of rural customs, odd folk practices like “luveniwai” which intertwines spirits and people, layers of folk belief persisting under incoming governmental and religious transformations. Here he echoes the Kipling who wrote of a Britain constituted by waves of conquest, small dark folk succeeded by lighter larger conquerors, some of them Roman. This waves-of-conquest imagery resonates with nineteenth-century imaginations of the peopling of the Pacific. On the other hand, beyond Kipling, Mr Joske’s Fiji was furnished by touchstones and colonial tropes from other colonies, especially India. Thus, for example, the early chapters in The Hill Tribes recount the 1867 journey of the missionary Thomas Baker into the inland hills of Viti Levu, pursued and preceded by a whale’s tooth (“tabua”), a valuable sent by a chief who desired Baker’s death. Later, Joske writes of similar tabuas, sent out by Navosavakadua and his followers in the Tuka movement, to recruit allies. He compares them to the sinister chuppaties of the “Mutiny” in India in 1847. (A wider-ranging colonial story from India imagined communication and recruitment among plotting mutineers via chupatties [griddle baked breads], laid on doorsteps.2) Joske shared in a web of colonial interaction and images, from a globe of imperial interrelation brought to Fiji as well as developed there. In The King of the Cannibal Islands, he wrote: “The first night I used [the mosquito net] the comfort was so great that I could not sleep. I was not selfish or inhospitable, as I shared it with an old veteran of the Indian



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Mutiny (as it was large and roomy) and he kept me awake by yarns of his adventures in that great catastrophe” (Brewster 1937: 130). From Joske’s account of a shared mosquito net, we get a sense of one of the webs of connections and transmissions in Empire. Every colonial officer he names went on from Fiji to another colony. Every settler who came to Fiji had a history, and a connection to somewhere else. Of course written words moved around the globe (colonial correspondence, for example, or Joske’s own volumes), but a hodgepodge of individuals also personally created the connections, enabling a shared imagination to be made real. Certainly in Joske’s texts, Fijians are conflated with the British Empire’s other “others,” internal and external. They are likened to Scottish highlanders: in Hill Tribes one picture of eleven Fijian men is captioned “fijian armed native constabulary in sulu or kilts. The contingent at King Edward’s Coronation were for a few days with the Gordons at Aberdeen, whom they regarded as kai vata, or relations, on account of the kilt.” Perhaps it was the Fijians’ idea to see the similarities. On the other hand, the assimilation of Fijian hill tribes to Scottish highlanders pervades Joske’s work, and that of first colonial governor, Sir Arthur Gordon. Here these hill people are also like the characters described by Kipling: “The men only wore a strip of malo or bark cloth, passed between their legs and fastened round the waist like a sash. This get-up very much resembled that of the immortal [sic], ‘not very much before and rather less than half of that behind.’” (Brewster 1937: 25). I wish I could more fully reproduce the playfulness of Joske/Brewster, as we consider the seriousness of that playfulness and its purposes, effectiveness, and effects in Joske’s life, and in the lives of the hill peoples of Fiji. In this passage in Hill Tribes, Kipling’s fictional “native” is not identified as Kipling’s fiction – is it that he has such reality in the imperial world created full? Or is it that Joske is writing the Fijians as Kipling wrote Gunga Din?

Mr Joske and Mr Brewster: From Jew to Roman A quick chronology: Adolph Brewster Joske spent about forty years in Fiji. He was born in Melbourne, Australia. In 1870, at age sixteen, just returned to Melbourne from school in England he helped his father in his business (1937: 63), and then he came to Fiji with the

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first batch of settlers who founded Suva, later Fiji’s capital. Many of these initial white settlers hoped to plant cotton to replace supplies diminished during the American Civil War. They came under the aegis of the Polynesia Company of Melbourne, a joint stock company that “hoped to become a humble imitation of the Honourable East India Company” (18). The Polynesia Company had given Cakobau of Bau, later “King Cakobau” 10,000 pounds to pay off a debt demanded by the United States for damages to property of US citizens in Fiji by some of Cakobau’s subjects. In return, Cakobau gave the Polynesia Company a charter and promised them land in several parts of Fiji. Some of the land Cakobau promised he did not fully control, and he was not able to make good on some of these promises. Joske claimed several lots in Suva itself. Joske’s father, Paul Joske, arriving in Fiji in 1871, joined another merchant to establish the firm of Brewer and Joske. The firm “opened business as merchants and bankers, built a cotton-ginning mill and bought cotton in the seed from the planters, or shipped it on their account” (154). They also issued banknotes. In 1873 Paul Joske, whom his son describes as “a very vigorous, enterprising man,” built the first sugar mill in Fiji (86, 219). In 1884 A.B. Joske joined the Fiji Civil Service. He was Deputy Commandant of the Armed Native Constabulary, Assistant to Resident Commissioner Walter Carew, Stipendiary Magistrate, and later Resident Commissioner in Colo. He married in 1902. Joske retired from the Colonial Service in Fiji in 1910 and went to live in Torquay, England – he calls this his “return to England.” He died in late 1937 (The Times 1937: 16). Joske’s father was described by a later colonial officer, Philip Snow (1997: 84), as “a pioneering German Jewish merchant, Paul Joske.” Setariki Tuinaceva, late archivist of Fiji’s National Archives, once gossiped to me about A.B. Joske: “He was a Jew, you know” (personal communication, 1984). Joske’s books, published in his later years, give no hint of this affiliation. Here is how he introduces himself in The King of the Cannibal Isles: “Already some young Melbourne men had started [cotton] plantations in Fiji … I too was Melbourne born, and had just retuned from school in England, in my sixteenth year. My father, instead of sending me peremptorily to the Church of England Grammar School, where three of my brothers were, allowed me to try to help in his business, saying at the same time that, were I but of age, he would send me to Fiji to plant cotton. Oh how my spirit longed that that might come to pass” (1937: 63).



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In numerous passages, often with awkward narrative results, Joske links his family to Christian institutions and identifies himself as Christian. Often he does this by way of opposing self and other. In The Hill Tribes of Fiji he compares Fijian rituals for adolescent boys and the Jewish ritual of bar mitzvah, describing both as “somewhat equivalent to our confirmation” (1922: 177–8). In The King of the Cannibal Isles he tells an anecdote about a group of settlers “amongst them a member of the Semitic race” (1937: 191) who turned out to be fleeing a debt. Joske’s language “others” this man, in a complete and utter contrast to his later use of a cozy, white colonial “we.” Of course histories of Jews are full of intermarriages, assimilations, refusals, and denials. And by Jewish law, children inherit Jewishness through their mothers, not fathers. No matter how we look at it, Joske was not, in his own sense of self, a Jew. He shunned the connection. But because others in Fiji raised it, in what I am sure was often denigratory gossip, Joske worked to escape it. This escape can be charted in Joske’s colonial service, in his literal geographical movement, and in the tropes of minute papers and memoirs. In the course of his time in Fiji he moved from being a merchant and planter to being a colonial official, in the course of his life he moved from Melbourne, to Fiji, to retirement in Torquay. And in retirement, due perhaps to anti-German sentiment during the First World War, he changed his name from Joske to Brewster. In his lifetime, he worked very hard to transform himself from (perceived) Jew to Roman, from a merchant far from home, Germannamed and of uncertain, not top-drawer Australian background into an English-named official and chronicler of an imperial project: From a member of a class of whites who were destined to fail in a Fiji organized by an aristocratic colonial administration and the administration’s sugar-growing monopoly, to a member of the administration itself. From a man called “flabby” in aristocratic governor Sir Arthur Gordon’s first impression, as he summed up the Fiji whites and predicted their economic collapse, to a man who made colonial law real as he sat in a magistrate’s court, and who created almost indelible versions of Fiji’s history in his writings. From an off-white white (in the sense that Sander Gilman argues that in the European imagination class and “race” otherness have often been assimilated to each other, and to the ostensible physical otherness of Jews), to a pith helmet–wearing white, a Victorian imperial British white. None of this was possible without the mediation of otherness, the otherness of Fijian and Fiji Indian disorder.

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Gazing at Fijians Long before I started to think seriously about Mr Joske, I always used to wonder about the frontispiece photo to The Hill Tribes of Fiji. Why is the first picture in the book one of a Fisher Maiden, looking longingly out to sea for her lover? The Hill Tribes live inland. They can’t gaze out to sea. The logic of the picture comes not from Fijian ethnography but from British readers’ expectation: the portrayal of an unclothed “Native” woman at the beginning of the book. The colonial gaze is patriarchal, it’s here also commoditizing. Mr Joske didn’t take this picture. The photo credit is to J.H. Waters, Suva. It is one of what was clearly a set of carefully posed portraits of Fijian types. Another photo by J.H. Waters included in the book (there are several more) is of “A Cannibal Hill Warrior.” The posed pictures by J.H. Waters are much prettier than Mr Joske’s own grainy photos, and those by others such as Sir John Bates Thurston, also included scattered throughout the text. But what the out-of-place coastal fisher maiden reminds us is that The Hill Tribes is not simply the product of Mr Joske’s gaze on the Fijians. It is a gaze to be shared. There is an audience for the book in mind. It was an audience who shared a colonial literary world. They knew the immortal Gunga Din already, were charmed that Fijians should recognize kinship with Scottish highlanders, and were interested in unclothed fisher maidens, but in an ethnographic context. Writing to this audience Mr Joske offered authenticity of knowledge and a look over his shoulder. Inviting others to gaze with him, he could not himself be the object of scrutiny – though he could be the self-deprecating object of admiration as he muddled through. Thus, on a typical page from The Hill Tribes (note how Kipling, yarns from India, and Roman magistrates intermingle in a few artless paragraphs), Joske ruefully describes his official attempts to get Fijian women to feed their infants cow’s milk, in baby bottles (a pet scheme of one of Fiji’s governors): Whatever [the idiosyncrasy] was, the district officers had to play up to it, as Fiji used to be a Crown Colony of a severe type which meant that His Excellency was a bit of an autocrat and it was best for one to understand his bent, if possible. Incidentally, I would add, we were miserable failures over the feeding bottles. The women always declared they would never use them, and they



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didn’t. Kipling says somewhere that in India the people always say that all the sahibs are mad, only some are madder than others. That opinion is fully shared by the Fijians and I do not wonder at it … The Resident Commissioner [Joske’s superior, Walter Carew] used to remark that Cicero had said that magistrates ought to be men of leisure. Speaking for myself, life was one continual state of toil and emergency, and having to find instant remedies for every conceivable kind of contingency, reminding me of the Hindu railway official in charge of a lonely jungle who, finding a tiger on the premises one day, bolted himself into his office and telegraphed to headquarters: “Tiger on platform; please arrange.” There were always tigers about in my district, for which I had to arrange. (1922: 55) Some of Mr Joske’s imagery is engagingly self-deprecating, playfully challenging colonial autocrats, and sympathizing with Fijians. Some of it, however, is far more immediately disturbing, denying shared sympathy with Fijians, narrating a white observer of black peoples’ foibles, capacities, or crimes. This latter sort especially plays off of the deeper ethnic, racial, and temporal template. Like many other colonial narrators in Fiji, Joske tells the story of the transformation of Fijians with black souls to salvation and light through Christian conversion and its visible signs: the covering of nakedness, the shearing of hair. Last to be converted, well into the 1870s the dark putatively “Melanesian” peoples of the interior were to Joske, as well as to many other settlers and administrators, “fuzzy wuzzies” – among other epithets, until they accepted religion and the Queen’s Rule.

Excellent Cooks Most of Mr Joske’s work as magistrate was spent on cases arising among indentured Indians in Fiji – but most of his published writing is about Fijians. Like most other whites in the islands, he looked for and found his Pacific Romance among Fijians. In Fiji, in the late 1870s, concerned about decline in population, about keeping the peace, and about making the colony profitable, the first colonial governor instituted a form of customary law, that well predated the better-known forms of British colonial Indirect Rule

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designed in Africa in the early twentieth century. Under Sir Arthur Gordon’s system, a vast apparatus of rule through Native Administration was concerned with ordering and observing Fijians and codifying their custom. The Native Lands Commission surveyed lands, interviewed Fijians, and reserved 83 per cent of Fiji’s land for communal, inalienable Fijian possession. The remaining lands, and rented Native lands, were used for Fiji’s plantation sugar industry, eventually run by a single corporation chosen by the colonial administration. Rather than employing Fijians on the sugar plantations, Gordon, who had previously served as governor in Trinidad and Mauritius, instituted a system of indentured labour, with Indians from the British colony of India coming on contracts to cut sugar cane. Though a reader of Kipling and tales of Indian customs and culture, Joske, as colonial administrator, absorbed Fiji’s peculiar distinction: in Fiji, it was believed, Fijians had customs and customary law, whereas Indians were workers, bound by contract law. Later, Mr Joske (renamed on his title page as A.B. Brewster, Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute) is already among the scholars who (almost invariably) have focused only on Fijian society, history, and culture. This has always been what the audience for Fiji has wanted, whether present-day tourists or the curious, exotic-fancying buyers of Mr Joske’s books, with Fijian maiden frontispiece or titles promising tales of “cannibals.” When it comes to labour diaspora peoples, there is more in Joske’s books about the Pacific islanders who worked Fiji’s early plantations than about the Indian immigrants. They come up, most strikingly, as the solution to every cultured settler’s dilemma: how to get a good cook. Here I quote several passages from the total of five pages out of 302 in The Hill Tribes that discuss the indentured Indians: I had a great deal to do with assisting the Indian settlers in getting leases of native lands, many of which I pegged out myself. We used to have an ordinance which permitted of the magistrates marking out blocks of not more than ten acres on account of the scarcity of duly qualified surveyors. I had read all Meadows Taylor’s books [Taylor, a colonial administrator in India, was one of the chief chroniclers of Thuggee], and was deeply interested in Indian rural life. The new environ affected the religious observances of these immigrants, and tended to a general subversion of morals, making it more difficult to keep them in



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order. They ate all sorts of unlawful things, and did many things which were wrong according to their own ideas of morality. This was at first, before any of their own holy men appeared upon the scene; afterwards when some of them came along they insisted upon the due performance of worship and ancient custom and then matters improved … The last time I held court at Tavua on the northern sea coast, where these people were principally congregated … the whole of the free Indian settlers came to the Court House in gala dress bringing tea, biscuits, fruit, cigars, ginger beer, sweet-meats and all sorts of things which they presented to me, together with a plated tea and coffee service and a silver manicure set for my wife. I took it as a very great tribute of their affection as I was leaving them for good, and they could have no hope of any favour from me in return. Subsequently Indian lawyers and agitators arrived and stirred up sedition and discontent. By their machinations a Commission was sent down from India to inquire as to the condition of their people in Fiji. It was composed, I believe, mostly of the class who are so arrogantly demanding equal status throughout the Empire, and they reported adversely and recommended that immigration in Fiji be stopped. It was a most unjust decision, as nowhere were Indians more fairly treated. After that some of Gandhi’s adherents appeared upon the scene and there were riots and strikes which were suppressed mainly by the loyalty of the Fijians who everywhere volunteered as special constables [and broke strikes by replacing Indian workers] … In justice to a great many of the Indians it should be added that the extremists coerced them into joining the strikes by threats of death. Many of them, especially the domestic servants, were deeply attached to their masters and mistresses and although they complied outwardly in the day time with the leaders’ orders, at night they returned to perform the household duties. Many of my friends have had Indians in their employ for nearly twenty years, and those of us who go back to the scene of our labours are generally looked up by their old servants, who ask to be taken on again. My own cook was with me for thirteen years, and I left him established upon a small farm. Now, alas! he has gone the way of all flesh, but all who visited Nadarivatu will remember the faithful Ferdinand and his great culinary skill. (1922: 299–302)

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If the real diasporic Indians aren’t much there in Mr Joske’s texts, India is, as a deep well of touchstones for his own colonial experience. Well furnished by Kipling, Joske’s Fiji drew on the tales of sinister Mutiny he heard when newly arrived in Fiji, sharing the mosquito net with the old India hand. Reading Meadows Taylor he absorbed the colonial legends of Thuggee. From Kipling he got more charming and malleable understandings: the Fijians are loyal, amusingly attired like Gunga Din; the Indians he would like to remember pay him tribute, give him tea sets, and are faithful cooks forever. But from that early imperial sharing under the mosquito net with its tales of the mutiny, Joske never loses his simultaneous fear of threats to his lawgiving order: Indian lawyers – presumptuous counterlawgivers – who arrive to threaten and negate the affectionate tea set, bringing sedition and discontent (legally proscribed as “disaffection” in colonial Fiji’s law). The woodland sprites of luveniwai and silver tea sets share a space with darker touchstones of disorder: compatriots of the tea-set givers seek to “arrogantly demand equal status throughout Empire” (1922: 300), luveniwai gives way to Tuka, with its sinister whale’s teeth which recollect the chupatties of the mutiny and its Fijian leader who styles himself a lawgiver.

Being Roman It is in this context that we can read Mr Joske’s account of the appearance of Mosese Dukumoi, also known as Navosavakadua, leader in the 1880s of the political-religious Tuka movement. (Navosavakadua means “the only voice” or “he who speaks once and is effective” – the same term, Joske noted, was used by Fijians to refer to the colonial Supreme Court justice.) Navosavakadua’s self-fashioning as a lawgiver addressed coastal chiefs’ presumptions, missionaries’ claims, and the lawgiving projects of hinterland colonial figures like Mr Joske. He gathered together adherents from “Twelve Tribes” at an inland pilgrimage place, organizing both a movement and a political form that was creative, syncretic, and tremendously threatening to the Fijian colonial order. Mr Joske was viscerally affected by Navosavakadua: “He was certainly not much to look at,” he wrote, “being very black and of a decidedly Melanesian type. He looked bilious and overfed, and had a dazed far-away look as if he was continually under the influence



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of narcotics” (1922: 244). Arrested and tried as a Dangerous and Disaffected Native, under new regulations passed primarily to control the hill people, Navosavakadua would be deported to Rotuma, and his kin to the island of Kadavu, home of Fijians “strongly impregnated with Polynesian blood and consequently light-skinned, good looking, and inclined to gaiety” (229), Joske wrote. Elsewhere he links their Polynesian bodily admixture to a resistance to Navosavakadua’s doctrines. Gazing at Navosavakadua – “I went over to attend the Court, not as a judicial officer, but to watch the case from my special knowledge of Tuka” (225) – Joske became an authority. Disciplining Tuka followers and other wrongdoers, he organized a crew of hill-tribe prisoners to cut roads in the hill country, and called them his “Lost Legion.” He thus became a Roman. Joske’s understanding of Rome arrives via British novelists and poets. He quotes Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome composed when Macaulay was a colonial administrator in India. He alludes to Kipling’s romantic portrayals of the Lost Legion. Whether it is Kipling, or others, the metaphors and the relationships were in many cases already drawn for him. What Kipling gave him, specially, was the “good language” (cf. Greg Dening (1992), on “Mr Bligh’s Bad Language”) to become a self-styled Roman. In chronicling the failure of Captain Bligh to win the respect of his men, Dening traced perceptively this failure to gain their full acceptance of his leadership. The rare British sea officer who rose from the ranks of common seamen (due to his superior skills when actually at sea), Bligh was resented for his command and discipline, especially when the Bounty was under great material stress, as we know from the facts of the actual historic mutiny against Bligh. What Dening shows, though, is that the legend of Bligh as harsh disciplinarian is belied by the ship records which detail rates of flogging and other acts of discipline and punishment lower than the British naval averages. Dening argues that in crisis, it was class prejudice, Bligh’s inability to be the gentleman, master, and therefore commander, that enabled deprivation and jeopardy to generate mutinous resistance to unpopular commands. Thus, we see exactly where Joske found his gentlemanly language and voice, in the well-loved Kiplings of Empire, and exactly what he did with it; he become A.B. Brewster. (Only people as informed as late Fiji archivist Mr Setariki Tuinaceva could later be skeptical, as when he joked, “Did that make him Adolph Brewster Brewster?”)

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From Hinterland Disaffection to Folk Practices As Mr Joske became Mr Brewster, Fiji was moving from a site of colonial pacification to a routinized colony. Bodies were crucial to the colonial body politic in Fiji. Heterogeneity, of colonizers and the colonized, meant that these bodies were relative, polysemic, and always reviewed in hierarchical contexts. Most interesting about the transforming personae of Mr Joske into Mr Brewster is the change in his tone concerning hinterland Tuka bodies and the body politic. The change is from his sober minute papers from the late 1800s warning of warriors with blackened faces crossing provincial borders, to later cozy comparisons of Fijian deities with woodland sprites. In the 1880s, in Stipendiary Magistrate Joske’s reports, invulnerability rites were made illegal, their practitioners monitored. Colonial inquiry included the question “what is the evil in the practice?” Statutes against Disaffected and Dangerous Natives were put into effect. But in the 1920s, in Mr Brewster’s memoirs published from afar (Torquay) there was no need to ask “what was the evil?” Mr Brewster’s audience knew already, but found it more diverting than dangerous.

Lawgiving, the Hill Tribes of Fiji, and “the Cultural Forces in Play” During oral history interviews about nineteenth-century leader Mosese Dukumoi, who was called Navosavakadua, and his Tuka movement, with Navosavakadua’s and his followers’ descendants, in Ra in the 1980s and 1990s, I occasionally asked people if they had heard of Mr Joske who commanded the Armed Native Constabulary at Nadarivatu in the 1880s and who had such an active role in investigating and arresting Navosavakadua and his followers. I never met anyone who had tales of Joske/Brewster. They did remember and narrate the experience of the consequences of his findings of “danger and disaffection”: arrests and deportations. Navosavakadua was deported to Rotuma, many of his relatives and followers to Kadavu. Most important to Vatukaloko people, however, was the story of their ancestor oracle priest Navosavakadua, his vision, and his leadership (Kaplan 1995; and see Kaplan 2005, 2007). In that history, we can see how the projects and plans of hill-tribe Fijians did much to shape Mr Joske.



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In 1874 Mr Joske could not have been the governor of colonial Fiji. That kind of post went first to more aristocratic appointees, like Sir Arthur Gordon. But he got work when the colonial project put its signs and systems at risk, as Sahlins would argue, in its ramifying effort to enfold Fijian history into itself. When the new colony met challenges and unrest from the hill people, and complexities in its engagement with Fijian modes of social order emerged (as when coastal high chiefs proved unable to pacify the highlands), Gordon looked to old Fiji hands to manage the people of the interior. Joske’s colonial employment began as Walter Carew’s second in command as resident commissioner in Colo East (Brewster 1922: 47ff). As we have seen, the Colo provinces, in the interior of Fiji’s biggest island, were historically less hierarchical polities than their Eastern coastal neighbours. Eastern coastal chiefs claimed sovereignty over some of the interior and hinterland peoples, and ritual and political struggles ensued. While Eastern coastal chiefs made their ritual and political power as dangerous foreigners, or synthetic descendants of chief-strangers and the women of the land (Sahlins 1985a), some interior peoples, such as the Vatukaloko, led by Navosavakadua, traced their autonomy to a ritual priority rooted in descent from gods of the land, from the interior Kauvadra Range. Certain of the inland people refused to follow King Cakobau, coastal chiefs, and people into Christianity in 1854, denied access to coastal labour recruiters in service of white planters, and did not acknowledge Cession to the Queen in 1874 (Kaplan 1989a, 1989b, 1990a, 1990b, 1995). After a military campaign against the interior people, Gordon authorized the hinterland station at Nadarivatu with its small corps of Armed Native Constabulary where Mr Joske spent much of his early colonial career. Because of this history, and unlike the coastal and island provinces, headed by Fijian administrators, Governor Gordon decided that the interior provinces were to be headed by white resident commissioners (1922: 47). Joske’s opportunity, to remake himself as a Roman began in the midst of these “cultural forces in play” in the colonial intersection with a deeper Fijian history, in an opposition between coastal kingdoms and interior peoples. Joske’s propensity for writing himself as not-Fijian took shape as well, as he saw coastal, Christian Fijians distinguish themselves from the unshorn heathen “big heads,” the Tuka adherents and followers of Navosavakadua, of the interior. Like Methodist missionary chroniclers of Fiji, he lauded Christian chiefs and deplored

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superstitious warrior priests of the hills. In these conjunctures, an enduring history as “disaffected” was created for the hill tribes, a history that has been both a limit and a resource. Lawgiving is a key aspect of the self-fashioning of Navosavakadua, leader of the movement against Christianity, colonialism, and their Fijian coastal allies. Colonial reports (Mr Joske’s among them) called him the leader of the Tuka movement, and denigrated it as heathen, superstition, and backsliding. They saw him as leader of a disaffected crowd, not subjects of a constituted, orderly Fijian or colonial polity. But Navosavakadua seems to have sought to constitute his own, new form of polity. Its authority drew on the leadership of oracle priests, not chiefs, and on hybrid deities, not the colonial established church. Self-named as Moses, he organized leadership, boundaries, and ritual practice for his followers. In the twentieth century his descendants and the descendants of his followers refashioned him as a Moses whose legacy and memory shaped their journey out of exile and punishment into return to lands at the foot of the Kauvadra Mountain Range (see Kaplan 1995). Thinking about Mr Joske turning himself from Jew to Roman brings to mind other British imperial figures who imagined themselves Roman, such as Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859), who wrote The Lays of Ancient Rome while serving as legal member of the Supreme Council of India, 1834–1838. Of even more interest is Sir William Jones (1746–1794), who in India set himself as a codifier of Indian law. As Bernard Cohn (1987) shows, Jones saw himself as a Roman, a lawgiver, who “gave” the Indians the (“their”) Laws of Manu. Of course Jones began his lawgiving career secure in his sense of self as a Roman, “Sir” William Jones, a classical scholar and barrister educated at Oxford. But I do not raise Macaulay or Jones to think of Joske as a participant in a unified colonial discourse. Considering the turn of anthropology to history, we learn much from the consideration of British culture in the making of British colonial power. We could not understand Mr Joske if we did not reflect on how forms of knowledge are modalities of power. However, we end here asking different questions about this complex colonial engagement. In our case, pondering Joske becoming Brewster, we could still argue from a unified model of a general British colonial culture (and borrow the image from Merleau-Ponty adopted by LéviStrauss, the idea that the landscape thinks through the painter, the myth through the person; in this sense, still, the British discourses



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are after all thinking through and transforming Joske). On the path blazed by Sahlins, however, we can pursue not only the cultural dimensions of colonial power and its impact on and via knowledge, but also the powers in culture. The history of Joske’s agency is both informed by colonial culture and in a charmingly manipulated way, a deliberate extension and motivated refashioning of it. It is not merely that Joske becomes an author. Just as Sahlins argues that history explodes the diversity of culture structures, so too authorships and their forms of authority merit fine-grained attention to their distinctions, powers, and consequences. Joske did not become an author in general, he became the Kipling of Fiji for its imperial audience and therefore a Kipling for Fiji’s future. Thus, we come full circle to Sahlins’s points about primary sources quoted at the outset. The point is not that Joske pretended to be a Kipling and was therefore biased in his tales of Fijians. The point is that he was, after all, startlingly empowered as both a significant actor in the events he related, and was (unlike Bligh) able to fully embrace and use the relevant literary tools and values. Thus, he really did become the British, Roman, Brewster. By his ability to authoritatively rework and extend imperial patterns of description and understanding, Joske made himself into the British kind of Roman, as he codified, in The Hill Tribes, the customary ways of the “Native” people. And he did not have to do this, though he certainly helped the empire make sense of the Fijian hinterland in its own particular way. Most soberly his description had obvious, enduring costs, especially for Navosavakadua and his followers. It could have been otherwise. Mr Joske (and for that matter Sir William Jones) could have found a cherished image of lawgiving in the figure of a Jew – Moses. But Mr Joske had met Moses (Mosese Dukumoi, aka Navosavakadua) and decided that he would rather be a Roman.

Notes 1 A conference paper by historian Arthur Williamson on Roman and Old Testament imagery in colonial discourse sparked my reading of Joske’s many references to Rome. Williamson argues that the imperial British (and some in the empire, notably certain Scottish elites) thought of empire as Roman – and see also Betts (1971) on “The Allusion to Rome in British Imperialist Thought of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth

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Centuries” – a point long made by Bernard Cohn, for example, in relation to Sir William Jones. From reading Williamson I also began to think about the ways that Jews figured as another category in the imagings of power and difference in empire – though I think that the Jew Mr Joske feared to be is very different from the Jews the Scottish elites imagined and hoped to evangelize. 2 See Kaye (1966), Sen (1957), Guha (1983), Arnold (1993), and Bhabha (1994) for influential accounts of these chappaties. They variously argue about comparison with Scottish burning crosses, about protonationalism, about plague warnings as the British army was an inadvertent choleraspreading vector (Arnold 1993), and about the anxiety from uncertainty of the meanings represented by the chappaties as itself constitutive of the uncanny circulation (Bhabha 1994). And see, most recently, Manan Ahmed’s excellent and influential blog Chapati Mystery (http://www.chapatimystery.com/about).

5 Supplement to Marshall Sahlins’s Voyage Around the Islands of History (Tahiti 1768, Samoa 1787) Serge Tcherkézoff The focus of this contribution1 is the apparent sexual offers that Polynesian women made to the first Europeans who arrived in Polynesia. If we go back to some journals written during the early voyages, which have still not been studied in as much detail as they deserve, we discover an unexpected aspect of these apparent sexual offers: the “girls’ very young” age and their “weeping.” This leads us toward a hypothesis. Many Polynesian sources attest that young girls who entered into marriage with a high chief had to be virgins (or at least girls who had not given birth).2 Other myths describe how young virgins would get pregnant by sitting nude in front of the rays of the rising sun.3 In the ritual dances, the first row was reserved for these young virgins.4 What was the special significance of virginity in all of these cases? The answer could well lie in the dialogue that Captain Bligh held with a number of Tahitians in 1789. He relates that he had numerous conversations with the “Queen” and with other “principal” people. Among other subjects, he made a “long enquiry,” he says, about a belief that the “Queen” would have her first child “through the inspiration of the Eatua” (atua, the god): “The Queen, whoever she is, has her first Born Son, or the one that becomes the Heir to the Crown, through the inspiration of the Eatua. Nay more than that, they assert that while the Woman is asleep and the Husband by her, the Eatua hovers over her, and literally explaining their expression, says he has connection with her & she conceives, but that all the

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other children are begot by the Husband” (Bligh 1789, quoted in Oliver 1974: 442). A partial confirmation of this is to be found in Teuira Henry’s reconstruction of the rites surrounding birth “when a queen was about to be delivered of her first child, called the matahiapo.” The songs chanted by those in attendance praise “the cord of the child, the sacred cord of the god that has flown hither.”5 James Morrison, who lived in Tahiti from 1789 to 1791, explains that the high chief of the time (Pomare II) had a divine father: “His Mother declaring that the Deity (Taane) Cohabited with her in her Sleep and, proving Pregnant soon after, the Child was declared to be the offspring of the Deity and is rever’d as something supernatural” (Oliver 1974: 774). My contention is that, at the initiative of the chiefs and priests-orators, the total cosmological framework, the mythical structure, and the underpinning of the Polynesian idea and practice of “theogamy” was transposed without modification onto the scene of the encounters with Europeans. These Europeans were considered envoys from the realm of these sources of fecundity, this cosmology demanding the presence of a female agent who had not yet given birth. This contention is based on a range of enquiries over a number of years. I happen to have been doing fieldwork in Samoa from early 1981, focusing on social and political organization. Rather unexpectedly, this led me to tackle gender issues, since the political structure strongly showed a deep contrast between a whole set of relations centred around the brother-sister pair and another set centred around the husband-wife pair. Thus, I was led to enquire into “men/women” relations in general, including representations of sexuality (Tcherkézoff 1993, 2003a). When the “Mead-Freeman debate” began in 1983, and Derek Freeman himself came to Samoa to give several presentations, I felt that the arguments vividly exchanged all failed to give accurate consideration to the beginning of the European myth-making of “Polynesian sexuality.” I gradually undertook a close reading of early sources regarding Samoa (Tcherkézoff 2004a). As I discovered that the sources, when read in their entirety and not only through secondary quotations of sentences taken out of their initial context (the journals of the first European visits), presented a very different picture, I began to ask how the Samoan context could have been so different from the Tahitian one as



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“described” by the same early visitors? I found myself delving into the sources relating to early visits in Tahiti, only to find that much of the established “knowledge” about early Tahiti was largely misconstrued (Tcherkézoff 2004b). When revised, both cases were very similar, despite the fact they came from opposite ends of Polynesia and had little contact with each other. I then thought that some generalization about early European visits in Polynesia could be offered for discussion.6 I finalized this essay in 2006, when Alex Golub came up with the idea of a Festschrift for Marshall Sahlins. It was twenty-five years after a certain lecture given by the same Marshall Sahlins. In Paris, in a lecture given at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in 1981, Marshall Sahlins, while addressing the question of Captain Cook’s fate in Hawai‘i, raised a point that was to change the view on these first sexual encounters. He hypothesized that, in the Hawaiian case, contrary to what these early voyagers had thought, it was not “sexual hospitality” offered to male travellers. Rather, said Sahlins, it was a transposition of a mythical and social schema: “theogamy,” marriage with creatures considered to be envoys of the gods, as partial images of these gods. The aim was to produce powerful children and to secure new kinds of powers. Sahlins found a first expression of this hypothesis in Diderot’s famous Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage Around the World customs (1964 [1796]), presented as a dialogue between a Tahitian elder and a European priest,7 and he thus entitled his 1981 lecture “Supplement to Captain Cook’s Voyage,” published later as chapter 1 of his Islands of History (1985a).8 That very year, 1981, as a freshly incorporated member of the EHESS, I was on my way for the first time to the Samoan islands, instructed by Daniel de Coppet to read carefully Sahlins’s Moala: Culture and Nature on a Fijian Island (1962a) as a masterful example of Pacific ethnography. A few years later, a team of the EHESS translated and in 1989 its press published Des Îles dans l’Histoire (Islands of History), a copy of which also made its way to Samoa several times in my bag. These conjunctions of sailing routes prompt me to offer here to Marshall, in homage to his pioneering views of 1981, my own tiny “supplement.” Indeed, a further enquiry into the mythical and social scheme of this “theogamy” can now be opened, at least for other parts of Polynesia. Why, in Samoa and in Tahiti,9 did the females who were presented to the first European male visitors have to be so young? Why were they weeping?

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Western “Knowledge” about Pre-Christian Samoan and Tahitian “Customs” Relating to Adolescence and Marriage The very first Europeans to set foot on Samoan soil were French – the officers and crew of Lapérouse’s expedition, and the encounter lasted only two days (10 and 11 December 1787). The report describing the behaviour of the inhabitants insisted on two aspects. The Samoan men were “ferocious barbarians” (because of the fight during the second day, where a dozen of the French – but some 30 Samoans who are hardly ever mentioned – died) (Tcherkézoff 2004a: chapter 4). The women, on the other hand, gained the admiring approval of the French visitors. Even after the “massacre,” Lapérouse noted, “Among a fairly large number of women I noticed two or three who were very pretty and who [one] could have thought had served as a model for the charming drawing of the Present Bearer of Cook’s third voyage,10 their hair was adorned with flowers … their eyes, their features, their movement spoke of gentleness whereas those of the men depicted ferocity and surprise. In any one sculptor[’s] study the latter would have been taken for Hercules and the young women for Diana, or her nymphs” (Dunmore, who translated and edited Lapérouse, 1995: 412–13). Lapérouse’s bias in favour of the women is explained by the sexual encounters that occurred during the stay and to which the French captain refers in his conclusion on the “customs” of the Samoans: “Whatever navigators who preceded us might say, I am convinced that at least in the Navigators Islands girls are mistresses of their own favours before marriage, their complaisance casts no dishonour on them, and it is more likely that when they marry they are under no obligation to account for their past behaviour. But I have no doubt that they are required to show more restraint when they are married” (Dunmore 1995: 420). After a mere two days of encounters on land, Lapérouse, without being able to understand a single word of the local language, had formed an opinion about the Samoan customs governing adolescence and marriage! Of course, he had already certain preconceptions of the ways of the “Indians” in that part of the Pacific, through his reading of Bougainville’s and Cook’s accounts of Tahiti and neighbouring islands. A careful reading of the succession of events described in Lapérouse’s journal (Tcherkézoff 2004a: 28–67) reveals the only scenes that Lapérouse’s officers could have seen and participated



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in: one or two “visits” to a village during which some of the French were taken inside a house where they were asked to have intercourse with a young girl. Limited as his experience of Samoan culture was, Lapérouse’s opinion – condensed in this single sentence that abruptly summarizes the upbringing and the rules of behaviour applying to Samoan girls – became an accepted part of Western anthropological “knowledge” about Polynesia. A century and a half later, in a vast compilation of Polynesian customs, which developed into several treatises and standard works of reference for any student of Polynesia, Williamson (1924, 1933, 1939), who had been instructed by Seligman to gather all the information available on this part of the Pacific, quoted that same sentence (from the 1797 publication of Lapérouse’s journal) in order to characterize the absence of “chastity” in pre-Christian Samoa (Williamson 1939: 156). And then, in the 1980s, when the heated debate initiated by Freeman (1983) focused on Mead’s 1926 fieldwork dealing with Samoan adolescence and her conclusions in Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead 1928; Tcherkézoff 2001a, 2001b, 2001c), one of the champions of Mead’s views called on Lapérouse as a witness: Williamson (1939/1975) carried out an extensive review of all of the early accounts of Polynesian cultures … With respect to premarital sex in general, he said that in Samoa: “According to Turner and Brown [early missionaries], chastity … was more a name than a reality … Lapérouse tells us that girls were, before marriage, ‘mistresses of their own favors, and their complaisance did not dishonor them’ (p. 156)” … From these many accounts, there can be little doubt that sexual behavior in Samoa before it was Christianized was more casual for virtually everyone, including young females. The denial of this by Freeman and some contemporary Samoans can be understood in terms of the concerted efforts of missionaries and the local pastors to create, and then maintain, a hegemony of Victorian sexual values and practices. (Côté 1994: 80–2) Twenty years earlier, in Tahiti, very similar scenes had been played out, and these were similarly absorbed into what were to become the Western canons about “Polynesian” customs. On only the second or third day of their Tahitian visit (7 or 8 April 1768), a small group of French officers (we can identify three of them from the

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journals) told their Captain, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, that they had been sexually “offered” a “young girl” in the chiefly household that they had visited. Bougainville recorded this in his journal, and in his book of 1771, famous throughout Europe, he abusively generalized: “several Frenchmen” had told him what kind of “hospitality” they had enjoyed, “in the custom of this island”; indeed, “we are offered all the young girls” (Bougainville 1966 [1771]: 194–5; Dunmore, who edited and translated Bougainville, 2002: 63). He later reflected upon this extraordinary society which had clearly remained as it was in Eden, untouched and spared the consequences of the Fall: Tahitian girls were “as was Eve before her sin” (as his companion Fesche expressed it, in Dunmore 2002: 257). We must note that Bougainville, even if he generalized instead of quoting the exact narratives of his companions (as can be seen when reading the events described in his companions’ journals), spoke of “the young girls” offered. A close study of the journals written by the members of Bougainville’s expedition (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 114–239) shows how the Frenchmen immediately imagined that this kind of behaviour had always been the local “custom” among Tahitians. The Frenchmen, like many early European visitors to the Polynesian islands, could not imagine that they were perceived as not-entirely-human creatures and even as envoys from the realm of the gods. They thought that they were received merely as voyagers to whom “hospitality” was offered. The Frenchmen had no conception that the way in which the girls behaved toward them was extraordinary. They were also blind – and how strange this seems given the scenes they were witnessing – to the fact that the girls were forcibly presented to them by adults. They were apparently deeply convinced that, among people who had remained in a “state of nature,” females engaging in sexual acts were only following the impulses of their “female nature.”11 And that here in this society they were “free” to follow those impulses.

Samoan Facts: The Scene Observed by Lapérouse Lapérouse’s narrative gives us some clues about the scenes in which the Samoan girls made the French believe that they were “mistresses of their own favours.” In the conclusion to his narrative, Lapérouse adds a passage which, given his typically cautious style, he was clearly hesitant about including in his official journal:



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As the story of our voyage can add a few pages to that of mankind I will not omit pictures that might shock in any other kind of book and I shall mention that the very small number of young and pretty island girls I referred to soon attracted the attention of a few Frenchmen who in spite of my orders endeavoured to establish links of intimacy with them; since our Frenchmen’s eyes revealed their desires they were soon discovered; some old women negotiated the transaction, an altar was set up in the most prominent hut, all the blinds were lowered, inquisitive spectators were driven off; the victim was placed within the arms of an old man who exhorted her to moderate her sorrow for she was weeping (qui l’exortoit à moderer sa douleur,12 car elle pleuroit); the matrons sang and howled during the ceremony, and the sacrifice was consummated in the presence of the women and the old man was acting as altar and priest. All the village’s women and children were around and outside the house, lightly raising the blinds and seeking the slightest gaps between the mats to enjoy this spectacle. Whatever navigators who preceded us might say, I am convinced that at least in the Navigators Islands girls are mistresses of their own favours before marriage, their complaisance casts no dishonour on them. (Dunmore 1995: 419–20) If the last sentence – which unerringly made its way into the twentieth-century literature as we have seen – is a typical example of European overinterpretation and overgeneralization, the preceding lines tell us what Lapérouse actually saw or at least what he had been told by some of his officers. In Lapérouse’s entire narrative of his stay in the Samoan archipelago, the only actual description he gives of a sexual act is this “sacrifice” in the “prominent hut.” Let us keep in mind a few points. This incident concerned only a “very small number of young … girls I referred to.” The “victims” were only “girls.” Each girl was “weeping.” She was apparently held by the orator during the “operation,” since this “old man” is said by Lapérouse to have himself been the “altar” on which the “sacrifice” was performed. She was presented in “the most prominent hut,” which seems to indicate a high stone base, which identifies the hut as the house of the main chief. All the blinds were lowered, and the women “sang and howled.” What Lapérouse describes corresponds to the enactment of a nineteenth-century Samoan marriage ceremony where the young bride was a virgin and was ceremonially deflowered. We can find

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in the narratives of the 1830s–50s the same spatial and temporal disposition. Even Lapérouse’s reference to the “matrons singing and howling” corresponds to what William T. Pritchard observed in the 1850s (Tcherkézoff 2003a: 350–70). Lapérouse’s remark that “all the blinds were lowered” is also very important. There were only two cases where an activity would be conducted inside a house with all the blinds lowered. One was a defloration ceremony. The other was a “meeting with the spirits” (fono ma aitu) when chiefs of the village, faced with making an important and difficult decision, and needing some superhuman inspiration, met at night and silently (Tcherkézoff 2004a: chapter 3). Let us now move to Tahiti and the events of almost twenty years before.

Tahitian Facts: The Scenes of 7–9 April (according to Nassau and Fesche) Nassau, 7 April 1768 When we compare the French journals and examine the dates of daily entries we find that the first “offering of girls” reported to Bougainville by his men occurred on 7 April, the first full day the French spent on land. The Prince of Nassau, who had been with Chevalier d’Oraison, tells us that they were “keen to call on their chief”: “When I arrived at his home, they served us fruit, then the women offered me a young girl. The Indians surrounded me and each was eager to share with his eyes in the pleasure I was about to enjoy. The young girl was very pretty but European preconceptions require more mystery. An Indian used very singular means to further excite my desires. Happy nation that does not yet know the odious names of shame and scandal” (Nassau, in Dunmore 2002: 283). We can note that a presentation, understood by the French as an “offering” (of a sexual gift), was made as soon as the French came on land. The adults were so keen for Nassau, as the apparent leader of the group, to be able to act his part that they tried to get him “excited” in a “very singular” way (of which we are told nothing more). Was this merely a matter of sexual “hospitality” staged by the dominant males of the place for their visitors – with women fully participating (by bringing in the girl?). The French assumed that it was, but they were blind to the exercise of masculine power since, for them, these scenes only showed how in Tahitian society “women” were generally “free” to “follow their natural drives” (see quotations



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in Tcherkézoff 2004b: 169–72, 202–7, 223–39). But, even given the gendered complexities of the “offer,” a gift of sexual hospitality would surely not have involved rushing upon the new arrivals in this manner, and trying to force them into accepting their offers. Nassau reported that, in the chief’s house he visited, the “young girl” was “offered,” and that this offer was made by “the women.” He does not say that the women offered their own favours. Nassau also tells us that there was a crowd who “surrounded” him and the girl. This gave the French to believe, as they noted in their journals, and Bougainville in his official voyage account, that “Tahitian custom” required, or at least allowed the performance of the sexual act to occur “publicly,” and even made of it a “public festival.” The French would continue to interpret any event involving their own presence in terms of the imagined everyday practices of Tahitian life. They did not for a moment suppose that all of this might be quite exceptional or, at least, occasioned specifically by families ceremonially giving their young daughters in marriage to powerful strangers imagined to be akin to sacred high chiefs. Fesche on 7 April Together in the chief’s house with Nassau and Chevalier d’Oraison was the young adventurer Fesche, who had volunteered to join Bougainville’s voyage of circumnavigation: There were three of us, we go off with the intent of taking a walk escorted by a group of islanders, we arrive at a hut where we are welcomed by the master of the house, he firstly shows us his possessions, making us understand that he was waiting for his wives who were due to arrive shortly. We go together, he shows us the tree the bark of which is used to make the loincloths they wear as their clothing and tells us the names of all that country’s fruits. After some time spent strolling, we returned to his home where we found his wife and young girl aged 12 or 13. We are made to sit, they bring us coconuts and bananas, we are invited to eat, we conform to their wishes. We then see each one of them pick up a green branch13 and sit in a circle around us, one of those present took a flute from which he drew pleasant soft sounds and they brought a mat that they laid out on the open space and on which the young girl sat down. All the Indians’ gestures made us clearly understand what this was about, however this practice being so contrary to

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those established for us and wanting to be sure of it, one of us [Nassau14] goes up to the offered victim, makes her the gift of an artificial pearl that he attaches to her ear, and ventures a kiss, which was well returned. A bold hand led by love slips down to two new-born apples (deux pommes naissantes) rivals of each other and worthy like those of Helen to serve as models for cups that would be incomparable for their beauty and the attraction of their shape. The hand soon slipped and by a fortunate effect of chance, fell on charms still hidden by one of their cloths, it was promptly removed by the girl herself whom we saw then dressed as Eve was before her sin. She did more, she stretched out on the mat, struck the chest of the aggressor, making him understand that she was giving herself to him and drew aside those two obstacles that defend the entrance to that temple where so many men make a daily sacrifice. The summons was very appealing and the athlete caressing her was too skilled in the art of fencing not to take her right away had not the presence of the surrounding 50 Indians, through the effect of our prejudices, put the brake on his fierce desires. (Fesche, in Dunmore 2002: 257) It should be noted that the girl was presented wearing a “loincloth,” that is barkcloth, which shows that she had been intentionally dressed for a ceremony. (If she had just come from work in the garden, she would have had on a belt of leaves.) We can judge the girl’s youth from the expression used to describe her breasts, together with Fesche’s own assessment that she was “aged 12 or 13.” And if, as Fesche says at the beginning, the man went to look for his “wives,” it was only the young girl who was offered. If we are to believe Nassau and Fesche, the role of the “women” was in fact to tell the girl what she had to do (Nassau: “the women offered me a young girl”) and, by means of gestures, together with the other adults, to make the French understand what was involved (Fesche: “All the Indians’ gestures made us clearly understand what this was about”).

“Tahitian Marriages” (Fesche) Fesche, the only observer to give us specific details about the first sexual presentation of a young girl, also provides us with a summary



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that either takes this scene up again, adding a number of points, or combines it with other similar scenes at which he had been present or that other men had described to him. Indeed, Fesche prides himself on describing “their marriages” for us. Like the rest of the French visitors, he of course knows nothing about how Tahitians might have conceived such marriages, the French only having stayed for ten days. At least, he admits straight away that he is only hypothesizing. What is interesting for us is that he admits that he is relying only on the sexual offerings made to the French (see his text below). For that reason, we need to pay his account some attention. It is not an imaginary tale about Tahitian marriages but the presentation of points in common between the several scenes of sexual presentation that were enacted for the benefit of the French. The description provides an important piece of information that I shall comment upon in a later section, namely, the performance of an “operation” that made the young girl “cry.” But first of all let us note two aspects, namely, that the Tahitians tried to force the French to take action and that the girl was still young and was “brought forward” by the adults. The Tahitian adults were surely following a definite strategy. Fesche’s Text Their marriages are, I believe, made in public. I make this supposition on the basis of what happened to possibly two-thirds of the Frenchmen: the fathers and mothers who brought their girls (amenaient leurs filles), presented them to the one who pleased them, and urged them to consummate the task of marriage with them (consommer l’oeuvre de mariage avec elle). The girl (la fille) struck the chest of the one to whom she was being offered, uttered a few words that expressed, from the meaning we have attributed to them,15 the surrender she was making of herself, lay down on the ground and removed her clothing. Several made a fuss when it came to the point (Plusieurs faisaient des façons quand il s’agissait d’en venir au fait), however they allowed themselves to be persuaded. During the operation (Durant l’opération), the islanders assisting [with the operation], always present in large numbers, made a circle around them, holding a green branch, sometimes they threw one of their cloths over the actor, as in

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Cythera they covered the happy lovers with greenery. If one of them happened to have a flute, he would play it, others accompanied him singing couplets dedicated to pleasure.16 Once the operation was over, the girl would cry (L’opération finie, la fille pleurait), but would easily recover her composure and make a thousand caresses to her new spouse as well as to all those who had been witnesses. There is some evidence that these are the same ceremonies as are used in their weddings; there may be some other formalities required, I believe this all the more readily because [when it happened that] an officer from the Etoile to whom a young Indian girl had offered herself was not favourably disposed, a Cytheran [named Ahutoru], the same one who joined us on board to follow us in our travels, took the girl and showed the officer how he should act. If there were no other formalities than those for a marriage, he would not have acted in this way. Moreover, all they did for us can only be viewed as honors they wished to pay to strangers. Married women are a model of faithfulness [… but “those who are unmarried are free and prostitute themselves with whomever takes their fancy”]. (Fesche 2002: 259–60; words in brackets added by author) A Forced Encounter Fesche begins his passage by saying, “their marriages are, I believe, made in public.” But let us go straight to the conclusion: seeing the officer’s difficulty, Ahutoru gave a demonstration of what had to be done. Fesche saw in this further confirmation that “marriage” (what he was really interested in was the act of intercourse) was performed in front of everyone. But his remark about what Ahutoru did on this occasion is very useful. It confirms something that comes up on at least five occasions in the French accounts, namely, that the Tahitians did everything they could to force the French to engage in sexual intercourse. These were the episodes (Tcherkézoff 2004b: chapters 5–6): 1 The first contact at sea (5 April) involving two young girls “from thir­­teen to fourteen years old” who were presented in a canoe while the adults made gestures that clearly mimicked the act of intercourse.



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2 and 3 The presentation of “Venus” (the first Tahitian woman who went on board, an adolescent who was accompanying Ahutoru: 6 April) and of “Helen” (the scene of 7 April: Nassau caressed her breasts but found himself unable to go any further), where these two girls were brought forward by the adults or even the “elderly men.” Onlookers made explicit gestures, with one of them even using “very singular means” to attempt to arouse Nassau’s sexual interest. 4 Nassau’s walk around the village when, on going into one of the houses, he was surrounded, undressed, and examined and touched intimately (see above). 5 The escapade of Bougainville’s cook (5 or 6 April) who experienced the same fate, but with less solicitude apparently (he swam to shore, before the official landing, was felt over, and once the examination had been made, he was pressed up against a girl, gestures being made to show what was expected of him – absolutely terrified, of course, he could do nothing at all). On each of those occasions, the Tahitians wanted the French to perform the sexual act that they expected of them. This time, as Fesche describes it, Ahutoru also gave a practical demonstration. But Fesche only draws from the attitude taken by Ahutoru toward the officer an additional argument in support of the idea that Tahitian “marriages” always take place in this fashion, that is, “publicly.” And he sees the Tahitians’ attempt to extend this offer of “marriage” to the French merely as “honours they wished to pay to strangers” (or new “allies and friends” as Nassau put it in his narrative). The Youth of the Victims and the Ceremonial Framework The generalization made by Fesche takes up important elements of the forced presentations of young girls. The Frenchman speaks of “girls” and generalizes by referring to “the fathers and mothers who brought their girls” meaning, therefore, that in every case the victim was young. Apart from the generalizing expressions about “women,” which merely express the fantasies of the Frenchmen, both of our French reporters (Nassau and Fesche), when they describe the exact situation of the first presentations, use only the words “girl” and “young girl.” Moreover, in every case the girl was brought forward by others. The onlookers always formed a circle

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and held a “green branch” in their hand. From many concurring sources we know of the ritual role of these branches in Tahiti: they allowed a taboo to be set aside so that one could enter into contact with a superior (Tcherkezoff 2004b: 424–6). The formal, ceremonial aspect is quite clear. There is another element: a piece of tapa cloth might be thrown over the girl at the crucial moment. Therefore it was not a question of voyeurism on the part of the audience with the aim of arousing collective sexual excitement. This further discredits the notion of the Tahitian taste for lovemaking performed “publicly.” It similarly calls into question the theory prevailing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that held that Tahitians made offerings to please the gods in the form of acts of human copulation performed in the open so that they would be visible from the heavens (Moerenhout 1837, Handy 1927; see Tcherkezoff 2004b: 463–6, 474–7). But this gesture also points to something tangible. If we move forward in time and take into account more detailed Polynesian ethnography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we invariably see that the fact of wrapping a person in tapa cloth is always a ritual gesture the aim of which is to call down the presence of the sacred forces from the world of the gods onto the earthly stage and to give efficacy to their actions (Valeri 1985; Babadzan 1993, 2003; Tcherkézoff 2002, 2003b, 2004a: chapter 10).

Neither Love nor Pleasure If we consider our two cases from Samoa and Tahiti, we should note that the presentation concerned “young girls.” The girls were even “very young,” as Lapérouse heard from his officer Vaujuas (Tcherkézoff 2004a: 45) and indeed as Fesche’s physical description of the Tahitian girl presented on 7 April attests. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of all the published narratives and journals for each of these two visits leads us to the certain conclusion that the very first presentations concerned only the “young girls.” The “women” were not involved. Their role was to bring forward the young girls and surround them, and to make sexual gestures – in the same way that they would stand behind the young virgins in the ceremonial dances performed to invoke the procreative powers of the male gods. This they did repeatedly, the most likely reason being that they wanted to explain to the visitors what was expected of them.



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However that may be, the constant references to the girls’ young age must henceforth completely invalidate the main hypothesis initially proposed by the French and then recycled in the form of a Western myth persisting until today: the sexual encounters had not been organized by the Tahitians and the Samoans in the name of love and pleasure. The hypothesis put forward by certain Frenchmen about these young girls being driven to satisfy their desire in the constant search for new lovers is totally untenable for the type of encounters we have seen described when we take into account the girls’ young age and their fear in front of these unknown creatures. On the other hand, if we consider the situation from the chiefs’ perspective, and imagine that their motive for presenting the French with young girls, even ones shrouded in tears, was to offer sexual pleasure to their visitors, we come up against two obstacles. First, this would suggest that the Polynesians had immediately seen the French as ordinary men, but I have conclusively shown elsewhere, drawing on a wide range of examples, that this hypothesis must be abandoned, because it is incompatible with too many other aspects of Polynesian society and culture of that time and as described by the same early visitors.17 Second, one could ask why these men, if their idea had been to please their visitors with a “sexual gift,” would have chosen for this purpose young or very young girls, distressed and physically tense, rather than young women who were just as attractive but more experienced. Young women who would most likely have been less frightened would have been preferable sexual partners and surely a more likely choice for sexual hospitality.18 In Polynesia the person of the young unmarried woman (and who has not given birth), holds an essential place in the “human” collectivity or ta(n)gata. Throughout Polynesia, societies have reserved a quite specific vocabulary for such a person, distinguishing her thus from the child, from the mother, from the woman as a sexual partner, and from women in general.19 But we are still waiting for persuasive evidence that sexual pleasure has something to do with young girls’ distinctive status. All we have is Handy’s unreliable reconstruction (1923, 1927) of a hypothetical Marquesan culture in which, he claims, the overriding purpose of this period of a woman’s life was to collect lovers. Mead followed close behind and thought she had confirmed this for Samoa when she heard her foremost male informant, a young teacher who was rather full of himself, smugly tell her about his sex

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life and his many female conquests. Mead made the grave error of attributing to the two sexes a vision that was an exclusively Samoan male view conveyed to her by this favourite informant.20 This male vision, which one finds elsewhere in Polynesia as well, was itself the expression of the normal fantasy life of young men, one that derived from myths glorifying the sexual appetite of the male gods and of the chiefs. It must be understood within the double standard21 of the male conquest of virgins versus the female preservation of virginity until marriage. An important consequence flowed from this: Mead did not pay any attention to the fact that the detailed account that this teacher gave her of his real or imaginary conquests also indicated that the young girl was often coerced and that she would subsequently have to suffer the reproaches and even blows of her family if the affair became public.22 The Question of Virginity in the French Accounts: The Girls’ Deflowering and Tears Finally, a spectre haunts these texts: that of deflowering. The words for which I have added the original French version in Fesche’s description of “marriages” strongly imply something never explicitly stated, either in Bougainville’s official account or in any of the journals. Let us reiterate these elements: the likely age of the girls presented; phrases indicating that they “made a fuss” before proceeding to the awaited act; the fact that the girl “was crying”; and especially the word “operation” which in French (as in English), when it is used in reference to the human body, implies some kind of serious surgical procedure. All of these things when considered together lead us to conclude that the sexual act offered to the visitor implied defloration. We can see that Bougainville’s 1771 readers, who were presented with nothing but delightful and beguiling scenes and visions, had no conception that the young women of “New Cythera,” whose “only passion is love,” as Bougainville told them, were in fact, in the arms of these Frenchman, not women gaily displaying their flower necklaces and their desires, but girls weeping: girls who were undergoing their first act of sexual intercourse and who were terrified to be thrown into the arms of unknown creatures to whom superhuman powers were attributed. One of Bougainville’s sentences, brief as it is, suddenly reveals that the officers and sailors had not hidden the truth from their captain (who has mostly stayed on board during the visit). It was always, if we take Fesche’s generalization as a guide, or



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sometimes the case that the girl brought forward and presented to the French was a virgin. If at least some members of the expedition had not so remarked to Bougainville, it would be difficult to see why, at the moment of his departure, he wrote, in reference to the peaceable character which seemed to him to typify Tahitian society: “love, the only God to which I believe these people offer any sacrifices. Here blood does not run on the altars [presumably a reference to human sacrifices] or if sometimes it reddens the altar the young victim is the first to rejoice at having spilt it” (Dunmore 2002: 72–3). We now have enough data to definitively depart from those Western illusions and to come back, with more precision, to Marshall Sahlins’s pioneering view: theogamy and not sexual hospitality.

Notes 1 This study was elaborated while I was hosted several times during 2001–02 at the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury, and was presented at the 2nd Western Polynesia and Fiji Workshop (CREDO , Marseille, 2002) gathered around Marshall Sahlins. All my thanks to Dr Stephanie Anderson for her editing (finalized on a much longer version elaborated later, when I was ARC Fellow at the Gender Relations Centre, Australian National University, during 2004–05, which was to be included into a collective work (M. Jolly, S. Tcherkézoff, and D. Tryon, eds., 2009: chapter 4); some changes here have been introduced by me and thus, when a passage sounds more “Frenglish” than English, responsibility is only mine. 2 See Tcherkézoff (2003a: 384) on Tongan and Hawaiian cases quoted by Douaire-Marsaudon (1998: 182–3) and Sahlins (1985a), in addition to the description of Samoan “marriages” (Tcherkézoff 2003a: chapter 8 passim). 3 For this theme in Tonga, see Douaire-Marsaudon (1998: 182–3); for Tokelau, see Tcherkézoff (2003a: 48–9). There are also Samoan legends on this topic. 4 There are very precise descriptions of the Samoan dances of the 1830s in Williams’s journal (Tcherkézoff 2003a: 384–7). In relation to Tahiti, Cook and Banks had noted that the young girls learning and practising the dances had to give up this specialized learning “as soon as they have form’d a connection with man” (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 303–4). 5 The complete account told by Teuira Henry is quoted by Oliver (1974: 414–16). 6 This led to taking a deep interest in gathering and making available sources of “first” and early encounters between Europeans and Pacific

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peoples. A joint program with Anne Salmond was elaborated, supported by the French “Pacific Fund” and French Embassies of Wellington and Canberra. Some results are now available online (www.pacific-encounters. fr), with the participation of the EHESS Branch hosted by ANU (www. pacific-dialogues.fr). Although Diderot himself really only proposed this idea in jest (Diderot 1964 [1796]: 499–501). When Diderot circulated his piece (1772) (unpublished until much later because of censorship), the 2nd edition of Bougainville’s Voyage had just come out in French with a “Supplément” (title of volume 2, which is the French translation of the anonymous first available narrative from Cook’s expedition, published in London in 1771), and Diderot probably found there the idea of his own title. The sexual encounters were not Sahlins’s main topic. In this lecture and in a book published the same year 1981, he dealt mainly with the rise and fall of Captain Cook’s fortunes in Hawaii (Sahlins 1981a, 1985a: chapter 1. Many other works on this question were to follow (see references in Sahlins 1995). The hypothesis of theogamy rests on the hypothesis that Polynesians have seen Europeans as flesh and bone forms of superhuman entities, as images of the gods (but not fundamentally different from the ritual images, elaborated in wood and barkcloth, used by Polynesians in their yearly rites of fecundity). The case considered was how Captain Cook has been assimilated to such an image of the Hawaiian god Lono – and not how Captain Cook would have been just “taken for Lono,” as Gananath Obeyesekere (1992) abusively simplified and presented Sahlins’s hypothesis (see Tcherkézoff 2004a: 109–53). I cannot attempt to show it here, but there are some strong elements, even if few of them, within the narratives concerning early encounters in Aotearoa, Tonga, Marquesas, and Rapa Nui that open the possibility for a generalization of the hypotheses drawn here for Samoa and Tahiti (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 189–97). See pictorial portfolios in Tcherkézoff (2004a, 2004b): Lapérouse refers to the drawing by John Webber (the artist on Cook’s third voyage) of a Tahitian girl bringing gifts of barkcloth and necklaces (we can see the extent to which the Tahitian scene played on Lapérouse’s mind when he visited Samoa). In his book, Bougainville only admitted to having noticed a temporary shyness or hesitation when the girls were presenting “themselves” to the French; but he was convinced that it was ingrained in the “nature of women” always to “claim not to want what they desire the most” (prétendent ne pas vouloir ce qu’elles désirent le plus) (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 128, 203).



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12 The French expression may imply physical pain as well as “sorrow.” 13 This was a ritual gesture that made the way open for stepping into a sacred and tabooed area (Tcherkézoff 2004b: 424–6). 14 As we now know from his own journal. 15 We should remember that the French only communicated by signs, as we know from the descriptions of other scenes. 16 As the French were unable to understand what was being sung, this is only Fesche’s interpretation. 17 See references above n3, and Tcherkézoff (2004a) for Samoa (60–2) and for Tonga, Hawaii, Cook, etc. (109–53), and in relation to the term “Papala(n)gi” used in Western Polynesia (193–6); for Tahiti (200–1). 18 As shown by various chants, all Polynesian cultures plainly recognized the desirability of sexual pleasure for both sexes (and practices involving sexual mutilation were quite foreign to them). 19 As tapairu in Maori or, in Samoan, tamaitai, tausala, augafaapae (in sharp distinction to fafine). 20 Aside from the whole question of how the Western myth about Polynesian sexuality obviously influenced her interpretation in the field, the main thrust of the revised view that we must now adopt in relation to Mead’s interpretation of girls’ adolescence in Samoa bears on gender roles. She thought that she had understood the feminine perspective on sexuality in Samoa, but in fact it was her male informant, absent from the published book but crucial in her field notes, who was her source (Tcherkézoff 2001a: chapter 8 passim). As these girls were constantly “joking-and-lying” (pepelo) when telling her the story of their supposedly free and easy private lives, their discourse (quite at odds with what they were actually experiencing but Mead did not realize it) appeared to Mead to correspond well enough with what her male informant had told her (Tcherkézoff 2001b). 21 I use this expression for the sake of brevity. But it does not reflect accurately the two levels of the ideology involved here. On one level, where the ideology is governed by ideas of family inheritance, the ancestors’ cult, etc., girls as “the relationship to the whole,” feagaiga, are seen as somewhat asexual, while boys, who are all their “brothers,” “serve” them. On another level, according to a universalistic notion of gender dualism and heterosexuality, boys as “males” are supposed to become full males by showing their ability to conquer the “females” (Tcherkézoff 1993, 2003a: chapter 7). 22 I have analyzed and published (in French) the informant’s account (Tcherkezoff 2003a: 366–71); for the original English text of this account, see Orans (1996).

6 Chassé-croisé: Or How Christianity Appropriated Indigenous Appropriation of Christianity on the Rio Negro Manuela Carneiro da Cunha The intellectual influence of Marshall Sahlins is pervasive in Brazilian anthropology. On a more personal level, since his groundbreaking essay “The Original Affluent Society” (in Sahlins 1972) I have counted myself as a devotee. This essay, however, is connected to Sahlins’s oeuvre in two more specific ways. I’ll spell out the first at once and will reserve the second for the end of this chapter. Sahlins has repeatedly made the case for the indigenization of Western cosmologies and for the reconfiguration of Western happenings into Indigenous events. Around a single happening, different events take place for different people, simultaneous yet mostly opaque to one another. Thus, everyone is making history, albeit in one’s own terms. As a counter-reading to the narrative of Western political, historical, and cosmological hegemony, anthropological analysis has mostly analyzed the Indigenous refraction of missionary endeavours. Yet missionary cosmologies are no less interesting than their Indigenous counterparts, and the analyses of missionary refractions of Indigenous discourse are to be similarly studied. Missionaries, after all, carry wherever they go their own potent cosmology. Lowland South American Indigenous people have been noteworthy for their tendency of appropriating foreign intangible as well as tangible goods in a particularly voracious manner. Their all-too-ready adoption of Christian manners and rituals in the sixteenth century



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was perplexing for the missionaries, who were led to condemn them as simulacra, as counterfeit Catholics (Vainfas 1995). Yet, at the very same time, Jesuits were discussing evidence among the Indians of an ancient pre-Columbian evangelization, since the New Testament by definition had to have global reach. Hence, Jesuits appropriated local myths of the Flood as evidence of biblical knowledge, and the traces of (the mythical character) Sumé’s feet on a rock as evidence of the early passage to the New World of Saint Thomas, the apostle. Sumé, it was argued, could well be the result of a linguistic drift from Tomé, which is Thomas in Portuguese (Carneiro da Cunha 1990). Appropriation was and still is a two-way street. The contemporary story I am about to tell in great detail bears witness to the same processes: appropriations and counter-appropriations are the rule for both missionaries and missionized.

News of a Miracle-Working Statue When we arrived to do our fieldwork, reports of a miraculous little statue reached us at once. We had landed in Santa Isabel that very morning, Laure Emperaire, my botanist friend and I, and we were having some fried fish, cassava flour, and beans as the restaurant owner broke the news. We would hear it again and again, retold with small variations by everyone: actually everyone but the priests, the nuns, and a few catechists who insisted on a different story.1 The popular version went more or less as follows. A man far upriver was in his canoe. A young woman was standing on the shore opposite the village. She asked him to take her across the river and overcame his objections that the canoe was much too small. The man was paddling at the prow. When he looked back at his passenger, she had turned into a small statue of Our Lady of Aparecida.2 People in the village wanted to erect a church in her honour, but they lacked money. In order to collect funds, they built a canoe for the statue, affectionately called “Santinha” (literally ‘little saint’). The canoe had no paddles, but it miraculously managed to float on its own downriver, to pass the Ipanoré Rapids and to reach the town of São Gabriel da Cachoeira. The people in São Gabriel put the Santinha and its canoe onto a larger boat and escorted it to the next village downriver. From then on, the statue would stay three days in every community and then

Figure 6.1.  The Upper and Middle Rio Negro basin. Source : Instituto Socioambiental, 2008.



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continue its voyage. In Santa Isabel, a town of some seven thousand inhabitants, the Santinha was feted for three days in each of the town’s seven neighbourhoods plus three days in the town’s main church. It had remained there for almost a month. A month prior to our arrival, the Santinha had left Santa Isabel, and it was now again on her way downriver. There was some uncertainty regarding its final destination: some would say Barcelos, some Carvoeiro further downriver, and some would even say it was due to go down to Manaus, where the Rio Negro ends and merges with the Solimões to form the Amazon River. The greatest variations, however, had to do with the apparition itself: where had the ominous event taken place? Everyone I talked to seemed to come up with a different version. Someone mentioned Nazaré on the Cubate River, another one a place upriver from the Caruru Rapids, still another one pointed to Tunuí on the Içana River, and two people mentioned Querari, the name of both a river and a community on the border with Colombia (see Figure 6.1). It so happened that the priest who had presided over the launching of the statue in Iarauetê had a completely different story to tell, with pictures of the launching to prove it. Father Reginaldo, an amiable Brazilian Salesian priest in his late thirties, had been appointed director of the Salesian mission in Iauaretê in 2005. Iauaretê is a town of some twenty-five hundred, inhabited by Arawakan-speaking Tariano until the establishment of a Salesian mission in 1930, and it is at present a multi-ethnic site comprising Upper Rio Negro Tukanoanspeaking groups (Andrello 2006). Actually, Iauaretê is the only existing town on Brazilian Indigenous land. A special Eucharist Congress was to take place in October 2005 all over Brazil, for the first time since 1980. The appointment of Father Reginaldo was locally commented upon as a move toward replacing foreign missionaries by Brazilian ones (Martini 2009.) There were other important changes going on in Iauaretê at the time. The administration of schools was passing from nuns’ into the hands of Indigenous teachers. Ipanoré, a river rapid where humanity would have emerged on the Uaupés River, was being anointed by the National Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute (IPHAN, Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional) as the very first intangible cultural heritage space in Brazil.3 The effervescence of a revival, punctuated by frequent traditional festivals, was in the air (ibid.). In July 2006 Father Reginaldo,

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who is of a generation attuned to post–Vatican II sensibilities with regard to local traditions, himself organized an innovative Catholic festival that explicitly incorporated folk and Indigenous elements. He enrolled all ten communities or neighbourhoods of Iauaretê and suggested the launch of a castelo (literally, a castle) – a floating balsa structure with votive candles that is sent downriver. Launching a castelo is part of the very popular and traditional Amazonian saints’ festivals that are said to go back to the time of Jesuit missions in the seventeenth century. A viable castelo should go far, and fishermen upon finding one anticipate good luck. Iauaretê had been under the firm control of the Salesians for decades, and people there were not allowed to indulge in what was considered folk Catholicism. That Father Reginaldo would suggest the launching of a castelo testifies to a new orientation. In the community of Our Lady of Aparecida – a mixed neighbourhood established in the 1980 where Tariano live along with Pira-Tapuia, Tukano, Arapasso, and Wanano (Andrello 2006: 131) – an elderly couple offered to lend a private statue of Our Lady of Aparecida.4 The statue was installed on an altar (some described it as a small boat) on top of the castelo. On 25 July 2006, as a closing ceremony to the saints’ festival, the parishioners assembled at dusk at the edge of the Uaupés River and watched as the castelo was sent off downstream. The idea was for the statue to spend one night at every community of the parish, under the care of the local catechist who would then be responsible for having the community hand over the statue to the next community downstream. Iarauaetê parish limits are the Ipanoré Rapids, and because Urubuquara is the last village in the parish, its catechist was supposed to return the statue to the main church of Iarauetê. However, people downstream from Ipanoré, from the adjacent parish of Taracuá, said that they too would like to be visited by Our Lady of Aparecida, and Father Reginaldo agreed to their request. That is where things began getting out of hand. In Taracuá, Our Lady of Aparecida appeared to a man in his dream, and she requested a church to be built in her honour. That was the start of the miraculous career of the statue and that was also the start of offerings. Chests were installed alongside the statue, and the money collected was to be used in the restoration of benches in the chapel of Aparecida in Iarauetê. As other parishes also asked for a visit, ultimately the statue continued its voyage eventually arriving



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in São Gabriel da Cachoeira on 9 October, three and a half months after its launching. It would stay in São Gabriel for a little under a month. São Gabriel is by now a relatively large town boasting thirty to forty thousand souls5 with Indigenous people from all over the Upper Rio Negro accounting for around 85 per cent of the inhabitants. São Gabriel is the only municipality in Brazil where there are three other official languages besides Portuguese: Baniwa (Arawakan), Tukano (Tukanoan), and Nheengatu (an Amazonian lingua franca introduced by Jesuits and based on Tupi). São Gabriel houses the headquarters of an active Indigenous organization. A growing military and a declining Catholic missionary presence, an important non-governmental environmental and human rights organization, a research institute, and a university satellite campus make São Gabriel a significant urban centre with crime on the rise and a diversified set of Protestant denominations and heterodox sects. Father Reginaldo suspects São Gabriel to be the source of what could be called a ritual hijacking. An incongruous ultra-conservative Catholic sect (on which more later) wrote up in minute detail the ritual that was supposed to be observed in Our Lady’s visit and for good measure threw in a book by the sect’s founder to be read during the ceremonies. Both the book and ritual prescriptions were to follow the statue everywhere. Twenty-two communities later, Our Lady entered the town of Santa Isabel on 2 February, 2007, where she stayed until 1 March (Fontes 2006). By that time, Father Reginaldo had been transferred as director of the Salesian mission from Iarauetê in the Upper Rio Negro to Santa Isabel in the Middle Rio Negro. As he received a miraculous image with an unorthodox story and a hyper-orthodox ritual in lieu of the simple statue he himself had launched some six months earlier, one can guess he had to do some soul-searching. Ultimately, he decided not to interfere too much and just added a one-page signed report with the “true” origin of the statue (Oliveira 2006). The report was carefully worded and did not directly challenge the popular belief about the statue having sailed unharmed on its own or about the benefits it could impart, though the word miracle was of course avoided and replaced by the more neutral “grace.” Although this document travelled with the statue from Santa Isabel on, I never saw anyone paying any attention to its story.

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Meeting the Santinha One day after landing in Santa Isabel, we started downriver. I was secretly hoping to catch up with the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida, while my botanist friend was hoping not to have her work program messed up by such unanticipated distraction. I was lucky. Not only had we not already missed the fluvial procession, it was still two villages upriver from Tapereira, where we were going to stay. A few days later Tapereira was busily preparing itself for the visit, and on 15 April the procession moored, after launching fireworks and circling three times in front of the village. In preparation men went out fishing until the catch was impressive enough, and they provided festive decorations. There was a colonnade of palm leaves leading to the school and balloons. Everything else was women’s work: cleaning fish, getting coal, cooking an abundant and varied meal, and later serving guests, cleaning up, and so on. For the Santinha hardly came alone. Families from the next village upriver were supposed to escort her, and a few people from the next stop downriver would also come to honour her. Then, too, many people from previous stops would have vowed (promised) to accompany it for a longer stretch of the river, usually for three or four stops. And then there were the families who lived in their small farms nearby rather than in villages and would not receive a special visit from the Santinha. That made up for an impressive crowd of visitors, whose hammocks would be hung under an old thatch roof nearby. The main statue in the local chapel altar was taken out to the riverbank with great ceremony in order to greet the visiting image. The honour of carrying it fell upon the eleven-year-old daughter of the community administrator or “captain.” Upon disembarking, the Santinha on its litter was carried around by men to pay a visit to every single house in the hamlet. The crowd followed. Having made a complete tour of the village, the Santinha was installed with great care and pomp upon the table at which the schoolmaster usually sat. Local images coming either from the village chapel or from people’s homes were then placed on a small table to the right of the main display where the little statue of Our Lady of Aparecida was standing, with hundreds of satin ribbons attached to its neck. These ribbons were mostly inscribed with requests, a tradition from the Rio Negro down to Pará that allegedly goes back to Carmelite



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missionaries three centuries ago. In Pará, however, I was later told by Father Reginaldo, people make a knot at the end of the ribbon to ensure compliance from the saint. On the Rio Negro, one does not resort to such pressure. Requests and supplications inscribed on the ribbons and sometimes on paper speak to people’s tribulations and aspirations. Some are amazingly candid and their authors can be easily identified. They amount to a public display of private issues: O Mother protect me from all forthcoming evil, give me health, joy, rid me of these vices of mine, tobacco and liquor … help me to live in harmony with my wife. I want you to rid me of my debts so that I can give some money to my mother for her to buy construction materials for our new house. Lady, never allow me to be without work. Don’t let me go unemployed so that one day my mother may feel proud of me. I want you to take away bad thoughts from my children’s heads [followed by the names of her four children]. Other requests are more secretive: “and help us with your grace to reach what we want to build for financial return [sic], have everything turn out well, mother Aparecida.” Almost all of them testify to a very strong bond between mothers and children that is also evident in life histories: “Our Lady of Aparecida, protect my children, rid them of their drunkenness, have pity.” Drunkenness is a regional scourge, affecting mostly men but not sparing women altogether. Boys start drinking hard in their early teens, and from Friday evening until Sunday most unmarried men and a great number of mature and old men are expected to be drunk. Women seem to take their husbands’ and sons’ drunkenness as a regrettable matter of course. They draw a line elsewhere, for they sharply distinguish between men who hit or beat their wives when under the influence from those, ethically acceptable, that refrain from so doing. I have come across two telling cases. One woman adamantly refused to marry the father of her five children on the grounds that he used to beat her when drunk. Another woman only agreed to marry her long-time companion when he promised to no longer beat her when drunk; she assured me he had kept his promise since then. This also implies that marriage is taken very seriously.

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Miracles The Santinha’s power manifested itself in several ways. She bestowed signals, she performed miracles, and she would provide help in the future through relics that stored, so to say, her powers. Signals came up in many guises. She would wink to some people. She would shed a tear for some others. An old Baniwa woman in the village had become Protestant while living in town. Her neighbour told me the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida, looking at her, had shed a small tear that everyone had been able to see, and at once the old woman had gone back to being Roman Catholic. If this is any proof, I did spot the old woman in the chapel. People (mostly sinners and Protestants) would “die” in her presence. I became alarmed at hearing this until I was told the expression referred to fainting rather than actually dying. Our Lady also wanted people to offer gifts with an open heart. She would know when this was not the case, and people would be returned their offerings at night and thus be publicly embarrassed. Storage of her power was important. Under the table where the statue and its boat were set, people put open bottles with water and many boxes of unlit candles. These items were to stay there for the three nights it would be spending in the community. The candles were then kept with care: they would illuminate people once the great darkness sets in and the world comes to an end. The water in the open bottles would have a more immediate use, since it was blessed with several curative virtues. One drop of it would impart a similar blessing to other recipients of the water, so one would always have blessed water available. A woman from the village asked us for a bottle of mineral water: she placed it under the table of the Santinha and intended to use it for treating her eyes. But Our Lady’s power was not only stored for future use. It was also already credited with many miracles, of which most were touchingly trivial. The only other great miracle I heard of – besides the original one, which is the apparition of the statue itself – was that she had stayed unharmed when Protestants, who would not believe in her, set her boat on fire. As proof, I was shown the supposedly charred beam of the boat itself. Another story told about some men who were supposed to be keeping a vigil for the Santinha, and instead they went outside to play dominoes, a favourite regional game. At some point, a dark



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cloud rose from the ground that frightened the men and had them running inside for cover. There were other stories: a man had a brand new padlock but had lost its key. He put the padlock next to the statue of a saint that he had left beside the Santinha for her to bless. A few days later, the padlock turned up open! There was a river peddler (marreteiro) in Santa Isabel. He did not believe in the little statue of Our Lady of Aparecida. The man had a motorcycle and enjoyed riding it while in town. One day while he was visiting a friend he left the motorcycle key in its keyhole. When he came out of the house, the key was no longer there. He thought that was a bad joke from his buddies and was quite angry at them. That night, the Santinha appeared in his dream, and she told him he lacked faith and should not be angry at his friends. The next day, the key reappeared, attached to one of the ribbons around the statue. From that day on, the man believed that the statue was miraculous and for one whole month, while it was in town, he followed the Santinha everywhere.

Domestic Altars, Village Chapels, and Saints A number of themes emerge here that need to be explicated such as dreams, household saints, and Protestants. Dreams are the usual medium used by supernatural entities on the Middle and Upper Rio Negro for a direct communication with Catholics. There are no records of visions or other forms of communication.6 It is in dreams that people are enjoined to accomplish things. It was in a dream that the Santinha first enjoined people to make offerings to her. A significant proportion of such prescriptive dreams today addresses two main concerns: giving up liquor and legitimating a marriage before the priest and possibly in civil law. A Salesian priest reported that after the visit of Our Lady of Aparecida to Santa Isabel, the number of confessions and marriages went up significantly. It is not excluded that such pastoral results influenced the decision not to cut short the image’s pilgrimage. People treasure statues of saints. The village patron saint’s statue will be communally owned and placed in the chapel. Every year a festival will be held in the village on the occasion of that saint’s day, attracting a large gathering from other villages. However, other statues can be privately held, and they subject their owners to the

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obligation of providing an annual festival for them. These privately owned images can be stored in one’s house, on a domestic altar, or entrusted to the village chapel. The importance attached to such statues is clear from the following example. An old Baniwa man I met in the community of Espírito Santo had two statues that came from his wife’s family. When his father-in-law passed away, the two were left mostly unattended. In fact, they actually were inherited by his wife’s brother, but as his brother-in-law was due to leave town (Barcelos), he offered them to him. “I’m not asking for them, mind you,” the man answered with proper decorum. “But I am staying in town.” “Then you keep them,” said the brother-in-law. “But you’ll have to see to their festival.” When the old man eventually left Barcelos himself he took along the statues. Every year, he provides all the food for the “Santissimo” festival, while the ritual itself is taken over by the “festival employees” such as the festival judge, the pole judge (juiz do mastro) or the major-domos, some of whom will be fulfilling (paying) a vow in accepting their roles. Miraculous statues, though individually found, are usually considered as belonging to a specific locality, rather than privately held. When I enquired about precedents in miraculous statues, I was told by one old Baniwa woman in the Espírito Santo community that, many years earlier in the Cassiquiare River, a hunter had found a statue of Saint Solano. He placed it in the village chapel. The next day, the statue wasn’t there anymore – it had returned to the original place where it had been found. This happened several times in a row, and at last the statue was locked up in a prison cell. But the statue again returned to its original place. In dreams, it appeared to the hunter and asked that a chapel be built on the very spot it had been found. By now that spot is a village, and everyone who passes by should disembark and give some offering to it. This story, by the way, bears the classical format of Iberian apparitions as described by W. Christian Jr (1981). Images of saints insist on being worshipped at the place where they were found, and they return motu proprio to their original site. There are stories about miraculous statues that are rather privately held. Two of the Upper Rio Negro Indigenous prophets (on which more below) actually each received the statue of a saint (Saint Feliciano and Saint Dante, respectively) brought down to them from within a bolt of lightning (see Tõrãmu Bayaru (Wenceslau Sampaio Galvão) and Guahari Ye Ñi (Raimundo Castro Galvão) 2004: 661).



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Of course, miraculous statues are the exception by definition, and most statues are just that, statues. Yet people cherish their privately held images. When the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida was brought into the Tapereira community, the other saints from the village, public as well as private, were brought in and set up on a lower stand, to the right of Our Lady. When people were done chanting and kissing the ribbons around the statue they would then kneel before the local statues and kiss their ribbons in turn. The idea is for the local images to receive the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida in a proper fashion, and then have them partake in the miraculous atmosphere, by “contagion” as Lévy-Bruhl would have put it.

The Ritual in Tapereira For three days and three nights in a row and taking turns, people kept a vigil around the Santinha, installed in the open-air schoolroom in her miniature boat over the schoolmaster’s table and facing the river. At regular intervals, several times a day, people would line up with visitors taking precedence and locals following them. The long lines were for devoutly kissing the ribbons attached to the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida. People would start off by kneeling in front of the table deemed to be the “feet,” then before the right side (the left arm), the back (the head), and the left side (the right arm) in turn. After thus kissing the ribbons four times they would turn to the local statues and kiss their ribbons, too, though only once. While this ceremony went on, people would keep repeating the same song for at least half an hour: “Beijai, beijai, beijai com alegria, Jesus Cristo rei da terra, filho da Virgem Maria” (Come and kiss, kiss with joy, Jesus Christ king of the world, son of the Virgin Mary). Other religious activities consisted in reciting the rosary, singing hymns, and listening to mostly terrifying readings about the impending end of the world contained in the book by Bento da Conceição (see below). When I asked the catechist who this Bento was, she told me he was a saint who had direct contact with Our Lady of Aparecida. Some men were all the while busy building a castelo to be sent downriver on the last night of Our Lady’s visit. The castelo was lit with many candles and placed on a boat on which people sing hymns and to whom other singers on the shore respond. It is finally launched from the middle of the river, with its candles glowing in

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the dark – this is quite a spectacular and eerie moment. The script of the launching of a castelo seems strikingly similar to the initial launching of the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida in Iarauetê, which is likely to have been modelled on it. Local women were very busy preparing and serving meals to the visitors. Men but also some young women were mostly playing dominoes at a short distance. Children were happy to have so much company and romance was also in the air for young people. Such gatherings are the occasion for socializing on a scale otherwise unavailable. Three mornings after its first arrival, the statue in its small ceremonial miniature boat was taken into a proper boat wholly decorated in which it was to be carried to the next community. As the heterodox sect prescribed, a Brazilian flag was to be put up at the back of the boat, while a flag from the State of Amazon was to be put up at the prow. A flotilla of boats followed the little Santinha. After an hour and a half, we entered Carabixi and the same ritual followed. The Tapereira catechist formally presented the Santinha to his counterpart in Carabixi and had him sign for its reception in a logbook that some politician in Santa Isabel had offered. The school in Carabixi was decorated with myriad paper flags; however, lacking alternative sources of paper, these festive flags had been cut out of schoolbook pages.

Festivals for the Saints The ritual prescribed by the odd ultra-conservative sect followed to a great extent the annual festivals in honour of the local saints. That similarity was clearly perceived, and whenever any hesitancy about the ritual to be followed would arise, the precedents on which behaviour would be modelled were such festivals. Yet, as a number of people pointed out, there were now two crucial differences. While saints’ festivals are occasions for dancing and heavy drinking, there was to be neither drinking nor dancing during the visit of the miraculous statue. Festivals or festas in honour of the patron saints of a village, neighbourhood, or town are mentioned as far back as the eighteenth century, when the Rio Negro was under Carmelite religious jurisdiction. There are also references to such festivals by the nineteenth-century



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Brazilian poet cum ethnographer Gonçalves Dias (2002 [1861]: 133), and by the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. Speaking of the Uaupés establishment described by the merchant he travelled with from Manaus, Wallace found the village to be almost deserted in 1850. He would write: “(Indians) only inhabit the village at times of festas, or on the arrival of a merchant like Senhor L.” (A.R. Wallace 1853: 138). Festivals in honour of saints appear to be very stable over time and have an interesting spatial distribution that seems to coincide with the rivers that were explored in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries while excluding more recently explored regions.7 From the Upper Rio Negro down to the estuary of the Amazon in Pará, they seem to follow the same patterns. The Amazonian writer José Veríssimo (1970 [1878]) describes a festival in honour of the Divino (the Holy Spirit) in the mid-Amazon in 1876, in which the kissing of the ribbons and other details are mentioned. In 1952 Eduardo Galvão was the first Brazilian anthropologist to earn a North American doctorate, at Columbia University, under Charles Wagley. His dissertation deals with religious life in a small town of Pará, Gurupá, and it was subsequently published in Brazil (Galvão 1955). More than fifty years later, thousand of miles upriver, Galvão’s descriptions would be perfectly suitable for Middle Rio Negro rituals. Fluvial processions circling three times before mooring, the launching of fireworks, the use of ribbons, and scores of other ritual habits could be pointed to. While rituals appear very stable, their organizational basis has changed significantly. Galvão mentions lay brotherhoods in Gurupá (which he calls Itá in his book) as sponsoring the festivals and notes their absence on the Upper Rio Negro in the 1950s (1979: 123). Lay brotherhoods were all-important for building churches, commissioning art, and providing services to their members from the late seventeenth century down to the end of the nineteenth century. In some regions of Brazil where Catholic orders such as Jesuits, Carmelites, Franciscans or others were forbidden to enter or were in too small numbers, brotherhoods de facto led the church. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church in Rome tried to regain its authority, a move that in Brazil led to a dramatic crisis pitting the bishop of Pará and the bishop of Pernambuco against lay brotherhoods backed by the imperial (Brazilian) government, and giving a fleeting victory to lay brotherhoods (Carneiro da Cunha 2013). Their disappearance as organizers of festivals is thus another

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sign of the growing centralization of the Catholic Church in the hands of the clergy. Popular or lay Catholicism is thus a permanent challenge for the established church. In the late nineteenth century, major Amazonian intellectuals such as J. Veríssimo (1970 [1878]) would deplore what they saw as the Indianization of Catholicism, going so far as to recommend the extinction of what is today more than ever before the major festival in Belém do Pará, the Nossa Senhora de Nazaré or Círio de Nazaré festival. As for the Upper Rio Negro itself, Catholicism was imparted somewhat in spurts. There were the occasional parish priest visits, two of which left valuable reports. A Jesuit mission aldeia in the midseventeenth century was followed in 1695 by Carmelites who kept a solid presence in the area for more than century after that. However, when Wallace visited the region in 1850, he found only one odd Carmelite, an ex-soldier who professed such a great respect for his frock that he would commit no sins or transgressions while wearing it during daytime. By then (in 1845), the Brazilian Empire had asked for the help of Italian Capuchin Franciscans for running Indian villages. Accordingly, a Capuchin was sent off to the region in 1850 but he seems to have remained only four years. Franciscans settled in the Lower Uaupés in 1880. Although they were welcomed for a while, their excessive zeal led them to sacrilegious extremities. Having obtained ritual flutes, trumpets, and masks from a Tariano – ritual objects that are to be strictly concealed from women – Friars Coppi and Cagnari publicly displayed such a mask first in the village plaza and then a couple of days later during mass. On 28 October 1883, Friar Coppi, on the pulpit, held a cross in one hand and a mask in the other and rhetorically asked his flock, “Tell me, which one is true?” As a result of such desecration, the Franciscans were expelled from Ipanoré by the outraged Tariano and had to run for their lives (Wright 1992: 261) The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century witnessed a scramble for religious provinces in the Amazon among different recently founded religious congregations. In 1914 Pope Pius X granted the Mission Province of the Rio Negro to the Dom Bosco Salesians.8 The Rio Negro Province was huge: 286,498 square kilometres and forty thousand souls. By 1915 a mission had been started in São Gabriel da Cachoeira. Barcelos mission, downriver on the Middle Rio Negro, was started in 1926. Iarauetê, on the



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border with Colombia, was founded in 1930.9 As Salesian fathers (and in 1923, Salesian nuns as well) established themselves, they adopted a muscular program of evangelization that entailed segregating many Indigenous children in six strict boarding schools, which persisted down to the 1980s. They forbade rituals and they forced headmen and shamans into surrendering precious ritual ornaments, boxes, and other regalia. They also had the communal longhouses destroyed. On the Rio Negro, Salesians, however, did it better than other religious orders, having more financial capital – and building strong political and social capital as well.10 There was, to be sure, early opposition by the Indian Protection Service (SPI, Serviço de Proteção aos Indios), created in 1910 by the military who followed Auguste Comte’s positivist credo and positivist church. This influential sector of the Brazilian military vocally objected to supporting Catholic missions among Indians with public money (Melo 2007). One of these men, Alípio Bandeira, actually launched a campaign of attacks aimed specifically at the Salesian missions, to wit his pamphlet bearing the suggestive title A Mystificação Saleziana (The Salesian Mystification) (Bandeira 1923). However, their objections were overcome and, from 1926 until 1936, the Brazilian government kept paying more than half of the missions’ expenses (Archivo Salesian Centrale, Roma A8630701). At that date, the Salesians had five churches, thirty-two chapels, and six health facilities in the province. In 1941 they obtained crucial logistical support from the Brazilian air force. By the 1970s Salesian missions in the Middle and Upper Rio Negro were held by the military in high esteem. It was understood that, by providing a sense of Brazilian nationality and enforcing the use of the Portuguese language in their boarding schools, they constituted a precious line of defence on the Brazilian border with Colombia and Venezuela.11 When, for example, American evangelical missionaries coming from Colombia started proselytizing on the Upper Içana by the late 1940s, with one American missionary (Sophie Muller, of whom more later) achieving great popularity, the Salesians set up a mission on the Lower Içana to stop Protestant attempts at Indigenous conversions. In 1953 SPI, the Indian Protection Service, obliged by expelling Sophie Muller back to Colombia. Protestantism and particularly Pentecostalism is known to have gained significant ground in Brazil in general. However, on the Rio

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Negro basin, so far, the progress of all versions of Protestantism has been held in check by the Salesians. The Protestant Baniwa might be the sole exception. The mission and Catholic boarding school of Santa Isabel was explicitly opened in 1942 to undercut the influence of a Baptist school on the stretch between Santa Isabel and São Gabriel. The Baptist school eventually shut down. In Santa Isabel several small evangelical churches attest to Protestant efforts, but physically they cannot compare to the massive church and the old boarding schools that overlook the river and are quite an impressive sight for anyone coming to Santa Isabel. In 2006 we saw a group of American Southern Baptists who had come to this small town in order to finish building and consecrating a Baptist church. Nevertheless, Protestant churches in the region have not nearly the influence they have elsewhere in the country. In the villages moreover, their influence is negligible.

The Internal Front: Popular Catholicism Indigenous rituals were thus being extirpated with relative ease on the Upper Rio Negro. A far more insidious and treacherous missionary front was aimed at fighting popular Catholicism everywhere in the mission fields. Lay brotherhoods, as Eduardo Galvão noted in the 1950s, were absent on the Upper Rio Negro, but even festivals in honour of the saints promoted by private individuals were shunned by the missionaries, on the grounds of their promoting non-religious activities such as dancing, along with more orthodox Catholic rituals (Galvão 1979: 122–3). Most of the early Salesians were Italian, but several priests from other nationalities joined and replaced them. Like in every religious order today there is a problem of recruitment. As the Austrian father who has been in the region for more than three decades puts it: “Europe is now a land in need of missions.” When I asked about Indigenous clergy, I was told that although there had been several candidates, “they lacked perseverance” and besides – this time sotto voce – “men had problems with alcohol.” I heard about an Indigenous priest who had quit the congregation, but information was fuzzy and people seemed ill at ease on the subject. There was, however, I was told, one Indigenous nun: only one, after fifty years of the establishment of the nuns in Santa Isabel.



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From the outset in the early twentieth century and down to this day, a great effort has been made by the Salesians to select and instruct catechists, have them conduct ceremonies on Sundays and on holidays in the chapels of the communities, and prepare children for their first communion. In January 1999 in Santa Isabel a twentyday course was given by Salesians from all over Brazil to instruct a group of 235 catechists! Regular visits of two or three days are paid to villages by a specially designated priest, although he might skip some villages where he doesn’t feel welcome or where attendance at services is low. All those efforts, however, do not result in perfect church control of the doctrine. In Espírito Santo village, the catechist in charge, who was among the 235 trained catechists, took his duties and responsibilities very seriously. He even organized communal meals after each service. However, not even he found anything strange or unorthodox in the book that had been smuggled in to accompany the miraculous statue of Our Lady of Aparecida. As a matter of fact, he found it inspiring and was pleased to receive a copy of it from a friend.

An Odd Sect The author of the book that accompanied the Santinha, Bento da Conceição, presents himself as a prophet who started receiving divine messages in 1994, in his mature years. He is a resident of the southern State of Santa Catarina, and I still haven’t found out how his doctrine spread thousands of miles from there to Barcelos on the Middle Rio Negro and probably upriver to São Gabriel. The book in question was volume IV of an opus of seventeen volumes and seven CDs! It is titled A Palavra Viva de Deus (The Living Word of God), subtitled Os Ceifadores (The Reapers) followed by a reference to Matthew 13:39, and it was published in Santa Catarina. There is a website, two phone numbers, and three email addresses. Most extraordinary are the miracles God bestowed on Bento. The founding one runs like this: In March 1992 Bento was on Taquarinha Beach in his State of Santa Catarina, and he sat to pray close to a small tree. As a falling dry leaf called his attention, he felt that something was happening. He looked at the tree branches and saw that God was present, for each branch had the form of a letter and together they spelled His Holy Name. He cut the branches and formed the word Deus (God).

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The photograph of that miraculous word stands prominently on the cover of all his books, and one can clearly see the picture on his website.12 Such a miracle was extolled in an endorsement by a priest and with explicit national pride was favourably compared to Guadalupe: The Divine Signature … In Brazil something even more spectacular happened. God left his signature. No Prophet, no Saint, no Mystic ever received the signature of god … (Padre Romulo Candido de Souza C.SS.R.) Another miracle, this one from 5 January 2001, occurred in which angels painted the Holy Face (of Jesus) on the wall, over a column in Bento’s chapel,13 while Jesus Himself sent Bento a message to the effect that this was His direct divine response to those who had cast doubts over the authenticity of the Turin shroud. A surgeon cum painter, described as a member of the Fine Arts Academy, was called in to give a detailed analysis of the painting, couched in technical terms, in which he described the Semitic features of the Face as well as the perfection of the painting technique that no human hand could account for. Among endorsements mostly by some Brazilian and Portuguese conservative priests, one stands out. On 9 June 2003 at exactly 8:05 p.m., the late Pope John XXIII sent a message from the afterlife, recommending to his successor, at the time John Paul II, to accept and recognize Bento’s message and oeuvre and intimating that the end of the world was coming. An interesting detail: he asserted his authority not only as a late pope but, by then, as a (recently and postmortem) canonized saint. The volume that was read aloud during the visit of the Santinha consisted in a series of divine “messages” and regularly started with the formula “My son Bento” followed by a homily. In such divine messages, God sounds like an ultra-conservative Roman Catholic, with an aversion for any Vatican II innovations. He recommends a modest dress code, family prayer, reciting the rosary, and taking communion from the hands of the priest, who should celebrate mass with his back to the assembly. He also speaks extensively about hell (which Bento allegedly saw in what was the source of his midlife conversion) and vituperates abortion.



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When I discussed the matter with an older Salesian, he stated that one could not properly call this a sect, since it did not prevent people from attending church. This curious definition of a sect might explain why the Salesian opposition to Bento da Conceição’s book and his ritual was only moderate at first. However, things were to dramatically change as the statute of Our Lady of Aparecida reached Barcelos. A year and a half after the passage of the Santinha, I was back in Santa Isabel only to hear the most confused accounts of what had happened in Barcelos. Young men had vandalized the boat of the statue, I was told. People wanted to keep it there, someone had robbed the money that had been offered, but it had been found and no one had been indicted. The Salesian bishop had taken the Santinha back upriver. Catholics were clearly embarrassed by the story, but Father Reginaldo gave me a candid account that was later corroborated by the superior of the nuns in Manaus. It seemed that the parish priest was out of town when the Santinha reached Barcelos. The followers of Bento da Conceição, on the other hand, were well organized there and tried to appropriate and capitalize on the statue. The nuns were outraged and hid the chests with the money to preserve the offerings, a move that predictably caused an uproar. Then people from the neighbourhood in Barcelos where the Santinha was wanted the statue to stay in their chapel, rather than in the main church. Against all odds, the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida had never­ theless completed its pilgrimage down to Carvoeiro and had returned to Barcelos, at which point the recently appointed Salesian bishop of the Rio Negro, born in Shanghai and raised in Brazil, had regained possession of it and taken it by plane to Iauaretê, thus hoping to put an end to the whole affair.

Messiahs of the Upper Rio Negro and Appropriation of Catholicism Festivals for the saints cover several thousand miles from the Brazilian border with Colombia and Venezuela along the Rio Negro and the Amazon down to its estuary; however, there is something specific in the religiosity of Upper Rio Negro societies. From the mid-nineteenth century on, an impressive series of messianic movements with different protagonists have been registered in that

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area. It appears that the first such wave of messianism was led by Arawak-speaking Baniwa, and it was able to spread to most of the twenty-two Indigenous societies of the area speaking a variety of Arawak and Tukanoan languages.14 By 1857 Venancio Kamiko, also called Venancio Christu, a Baniwa Indian on the Içana River, started a “Religion of the Cross” that endured at least until the first decade of the twentieth century. Venancio Christu, by the way, enjoined the celebrations of saints’ festivals. Another prophet, Alexandre, came some time later. Then came Vicente Christu, an Arapasso. By the 1920s Uetsu, son of Venancio Kamiko, was leading a renewed messianic movement. Then from the 1950s until the 1970s, Kuduí, another Baniwa prophet, gained ascendancy (Wright 2005). At the end of the 1940s a most extraordinary messianic cult appeared on the Upper Içana. Its heroine was none other than an American Adventist evangelical missionary, Sophie Muller, the adventurous daughter of a Catholic German father and a Protestant North American mother (Wright 1992, 2005). Appropriation of Catholicism in these stories is quite salient. Venancio Christu Kamiko and Vicente Christu, of course, appropriated Christ’s title. Vicente foretold that missionaries would come and reinforce his teachings. Statues of Venancio Kamiko show him dressed in Franciscan frocks, and many of those prophets had resurrection stories modelled on Christ’s. Brazilian Indigenous symbolic voracity, that is, the adoption and indigenization of other peoples’ traditions and religions, has been historically documented since the sixteenth century. There are records of similar stories – the Santidades – dating from the sixteenth century and involving Tupi and Guarani societies on the coast. There, too, as I have mentioned elsewhere, there was full-hearted appropriation by Indians of Catholic themes, symbols, and main figures such as Christ himself, which caused no little scandal among Jesuits and colonial authorities (Carneiro da Cunha 1995, Vainfas 1995). Lévi-Strauss (1991) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1993), among others, have discussed that peculiarity, namely, what could be described as openness to the foreign and a readiness to incorporate it:15 something like an excessive disposition to adopting other people’s manners. Adoption should here be understood not as compliance with other people’s dictates, but rather in the etymological sense of making them one’s own child,



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tailoring them to one’s order, situation, and aspirations. Aspirations are central here, for having access to commodities, foreign wealth, or even achieving foreign identity – becoming colonists and patrons instead of exploited Indians – played a significant role for pursuing such adoption. It is no accident, I think, that from the early colonial period, missionaries in Catholic America found it, on the one hand, exceedingly easy to convert Indigenous people16 and yet, on the other hand, soon found out that Catholicism ran the danger of being instead converted to Indigenous manners (Carneiro da Cunha 1990). Alan Durston (2004), for one, documents the problems involved in recovering control of the translation of catechisms in early colonial Lima.

Counter-appropriations Although appropriation and indigenization of Christianity have been widely discussed topics, the flip side, that is, Christianity’s counter-appropriations have received much less attention. A good example of that two-way struggle for control of symbols is the story of the Cross in Upper Rio Negro. Desana Indians’ narratives published in 2004 (Tõrãmu Bayaru and Guahari Ye Ñi 2004) name the already mentioned, Baniwa Christu, aka Venancio Kamiko, as the inventor of the “Chant of the Cross,” who would have imparted that song to another Baniwa from the Orinoco River, Alicente, and to Tomaso, a Pira-tapuia from a tributary of the Papuri River. Tomaso in turn taught Vicente, a Wanano, and Joaquim Parakata, a Tukano. It was Joaquim who taught the song of the Cross to a lot of different people, Desana, Tuyuka, Karapanã, Tariano, and Pira-tapuia. A Desana, Benedito, taught it to a Maku and to others. But then in the following generation, all who knew the song had died. Three generations passed before a little Desana girl, Maria, emerged. As a toddler, she cried for a drum and a cross, which her father duly provided. She would then sing the “Chant of the Cross” without ever having been taught. After her early death, a Tukano named Cesário or Ñahuri arose. He learned the song in a dream. He preached the same precepts as Maria. He died of old age, and three years later Raimundo, the son of another prophet, José, learned the “Chant of the Cross” in a dream. He was a Tukano from the Turi River. Raimundo was the last messiah of the Rio Negro. It was he who

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erected a cross right in front of his house and performed prodigies. He also predicted the arrival of missionaries and assured people that they would reinforce his teachings. The narrators (Tõrãmu Bayaru and Guahari Ye Ñi 2004) end up enumerating all the prophets of the Cross, leaving out Vicente for some reason: Kamiko, Tomaso, Alicente, Joaquim Parakata, Benedito, Maria, Ñahuri, José, and Raimundo. There is an interesting distinction emphasized between the first group of prophets and the later messiahs. Although there is an uninterrupted line of transmission between Kamiko and the next four prophets, the latter group of four all learned the song by themselves. Raimundo, it is said, erected a Cross around 1910–15. The followers of the Cross indigenized Catholicism in good Sahlinsian fashion. The Salesians fought this appropriation with two strategies. An older one concerned the reappropriation of the alienated symbols. The other followed the Vatican II formula: the Catholicization of Indigeneity. Take the case of the Cross. One might bring in at this juncture – however anachronistic it might seem at first glance – the important medieval tradition of the finding in the early fourth century AD of the True Cross by Saint Helena, mother of the first Christian emperor, Constantine.17 As for prophet Raimundo’s cross, it was solidly planted between 1910 and 1915 beside a stream and thought by the Indians to be miraculous. In 1971 that cross was found buried under 50 centimetres of earth. The circumstances of its discovery were deemed extraordinary. The way an Austrian Salesian father in Santa Isabel told me the episode indicated he thought those circumstances to be outright miraculous. The Salesians duly uprooted that cross and solemnly took it to a series of communities – in a way strongly reminiscent of what happened to the little statue of Our Lady of Aparecida. On Good Friday 1971 Raimundo’s cross was set up inside the door of the Iauaretê church. The message was clearly that the indigenous cross was but a prefiguration of the (True Catholic) Cross the missionaries were bringing. Moreover, it seems that the arms of the cross were cropped – a telling if unconscious symbolic treatment – to fit the measurements of its new emplacement. Later, the Salesians decided to set it up in a separate chapel outside the church. Still later, they decided to set up another cross and try to erect it where Raimundo’s original had once stood. At that point, no one any longer knew the correct spot. However, as people



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were trying to set up the new cross, they found out – a prodigy once again – that the foundations of the original one were just below their feet. Those are the terms in which the Austrian missionary told me the story. In short, a Catholic topos was used to interpret and encompass an Indigenous appropriation of a Catholic symbol, in a fertile and apparently unending dialogue of appropriations and counter-appropriations. Allow me to talk about other counter-appropriations. Many of the ritual and political regalia of Upper Rio Negro societies found their way to a small but very interesting museum in Manaus, kept by the Salesian nuns.18 This fact had been known for quite some time by the Indigenous people of the Upper Rio Negro. The reasons for the missionaries keeping the very ritual artifacts that they asked Indians to surrender, burn down, or abandon in the first place must have seemed mystifying to the Indians. Hadn’t they taught that these were objects from the Devil? Some were also outraged at there being an entrance fee for them to see their artifacts, a practice that was soon relinquished. It was only in 2005, however, that, spurred by a growing sense of heritage, a delegation of the Federation of Indigenous Organizations of the Rio Negro (Federação das Organizações Indígenas do Rio Negro, FOIRN), the paramount organization of Indigenous people of the Rio Negro, descended on the museum in Manaus and asked for restitution. They were backed by both the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and by an important NGO, Instituto Socioambiental.The Salesian headquarters in Rome authorized the restitution of 108 such objects (G. Andrello, personal communication, 2008) which were subsequently repatriated with unforeseen and somewhat terrifying developments.19

Regimes of Religion The above discussion should not induce us to understand folk and official Catholicism as equivalent regimes, raiding each other’s fields. That, I think, would amount to an utter misunderstanding of the differences between the two. Official Catholicism is a religion of sin, and sin is essentially a distance from God. Lack is the keyword of such a religion. As Marshall Sahlins (1996) has suggested, it is a cosmology of incompleteness. Furthermore, it is a centralized institution that is allowed to regulate every realm of people’s lives, as if such discipline were important to God. It is vigilant over

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interpretations, deviations, and heresies. It can cast people out, and it may refuse to baptize and to give absolution. Popular Catholicism in the Amazon might be understood as a very different regime, one that instead of distance and sin, emphasizes close proximity, and the direct interest of God, Our Lady, and the saints not in discipline but in people’s minute worries: a lost key to one’s motorcycle, one’s children’s prospects. It encompasses people rather than casting them out. It brings them into its fold; it puts them in charge of festivals and of tending to domestic images (statues). It also encompasses all kinds of sects, as it does not distinguish between orthodox and heterodox doctrines. As against a religion of incompleteness, it is a religion of adjunction and aggregation. Thus, official Catholicism manifests itself in this story by the control it tries to exert: a benign control such as the letter Father Reginaldo put into the boat of the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida reporting the “true story” of its origin; or a more imperious control such as the bishop’s sequestering of the statue in Barcelos and its disappearance from the public eye. In contrast, popular Catholicism mimics the flow of the river and its affluents: as the Santinha descended, all kinds of accretions were made to its story; different origins were assigned to it, with different versions being equally acceptable and none gaining full authority.20

Social and Spiritual Geography Recall the uncertainty about where the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida was supposed to have first appeared. Social geography is significant here. What places, what stretches of the Negro, the Tiquié, and the Içana do people from the Middle Rio Negro actually know? Not everyone has been to the capital of the municipality: Santa Isabel for the left bank and, downriver, Barcelos for the right bank. It is an odd administrative division, for people in villages that face each other on the two sides of the Rio Negro actually travel in different directions when it comes to registering children and collecting pensions. Knowing the river beyond that largely depends on one’s generation, gender, and occupation. Children and youngsters today tend to know the villages or towns where their grandparents and close relatives are living. Marriage is virilocal, at least for a time, and women will know the villages in which they were reared. As land access for



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agriculture in the rural areas is not an issue and is freely available provided one gets the almost nominal permission from the community leader, people change their abode with relative ease within the region. Fishermen are supposed to know very intimately and in detail every island and every site of the river within their fishing area, which is essentially local. Young or unmarried men will try their hand at some extractive activity such as capturing cardinals, a highly sought after ornamental fish, or collecting piassava, an older extractive activity that still brings in some revenue and has survived even after rubber, Brazil nuts, balata, sorva, and chicle collapsed. The heyday of the extractive economy is definitely gone, however, and with it the three-centuries old practice of “descending” Indigenous peoples. The 1970s were probably the last time that scores of Baniwa, Tukano, Tuyuka, Pira-Tapuyas, and other upriver Indians were talked or lured (or even outright kidnapped) into going down to the Middle Rio Negro to replenish its extractive workforce. Although such work could be seen as seasonal, resettlement would often become permanent. Hence, people in the Santa Isabel municipality today are to a large extent the progeny of those so-called descended Indians from upriver. The village of Espírito Santo, for one, is mostly inhabited by descendants of Baniwa from upriver. The elders still speak Baniwa, which their children claim to understand. Nevertheless, most adults have adopted the old regional lingua franca introduced by the Jesuits, the nheengatu. The grandchildren, in turn, speak Portuguese while claiming to understand some nheengatu. In other words, only very old people have had first-hand experience of life upriver, and very few people have ever had the means of going back upriver beyond São Gabriel to visit their long-lost kin. Going downriver to Manaus, in contrast, and working there for some time is quite common. Hence, upriver is unknown country to most people, even as the names of its villages and rivers are familiar. That the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida is deemed to have originated so far upriver, maybe even in Colombian territory, conjures a regional spiritual geography. One old man, whose parents were Baniwa, declared the statue had first appeared in Tunuí. Tunuí, on the mid-Içana, in Baniwa country, was Venancio Christu’s or Venancio Kamiko’s place. Nazaré on the Cubate River, an affluent of the Tiquié, in Baniwa territory, was also mentioned. Then there was a mention of Caruru,

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both the name of a Wanano community upriver from Iauaretê and another one further upriver in Colombia. There is a double mention of Querari, river or village, where there is a growing Cubeo community.21 What all these latter different places have in common is that they are all far upriver, on the border with Colombia or even within Colombian territory. Colombian territory is today a cultural reservoir for the Upper Rio Negrinos. Tukanoan-speaking groups from the Uaupés who surrendered their precious chests of plumed ornaments to the missionaries are counting on their Colombian neighbours for getting them back. The Tuyuka and Desana have already received ornaments from Colombia, while the Wanano and Tariano are considering a risky and expensive expedition to the Bará in order to trade gunshots for ritual ornaments (G. Andrello, personal communication, 2008). What I am suggesting here is that the attribution of the statue of Our Lady of Aparecida to a number of disparate origins in space reconnects it to various sources of ritual empowerment. What I feel most relevant here, the message of this story is that it gives evidence of a struggle for the appropriation of symbols on the Rio Negro in which the Catholic Church, a heretic sect, and Protestants – as much as local Indigenous people – are involved. There is a chasse-croisé going on: while missionaries of a post–Vatican II persuasion seek to emulate and incorporate “traditional” local rituals, Indigenous peoples try to appropriate the Cross, Christ, and other Christian symbols. Indigenization of Catholic modernity goes hand in hand with modernist Catholicization of Indigeneity. There is a somewhat cryptic homage to Marshall Sahlins in my choice of telling this story, and I might as well explain it now. A few years ago, Marshall told me as he gave me a volume of Anahulu (1992) that he considered that book to be his most important work: Anahulu deals with the history of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and was written in collaboration with archaeologist Patrick Kirch. Elsewhere, Marshall speaks of ascending from theory to the empirical. I take these statements, à tort ou à raison, to mean that our most lasting contribution as anthropologists might be – after all is said and done – data, fieldwork, and the stories they unveil. Just that.



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Notes 1 Fieldwork was carried out through PACTA , “Local Peoples, Agrobiodiversity and Associated Traditional Knowledge in Amazonia,” a joint Brazilian and French research program involving CNP q – Unicamp/IRD  – UR 200/Palos, no. 492693/2004-8 with grants from IRD , CNP q, ANR -Biodivalloc, and BRG, and with the collaboration of ACIMRN (Indigenous Communities of the Middle Rio Negro Association). Research authorization no. 139, Diário Oficial da União (04/04/2006). 2 Our Lady of Aparecida (Aparecida meaning “the one who appeared”) is the patron saint of Brazil, and her original statue itself is considered to work miracles. It was found in 1717, so the legend goes, by three fishermen in the Paraíba River, in southeastern Brazil. 3 According to Unesco 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, cultural spaces associated with practices and knowledge and felt to be part of people’s cultural heritage fall into the definition of what constitutes Intangible Cultural Heritage. At its national level, Brazil keeps a register of Intangible Cultural Heritage Spaces, along with other registers concerning celebrations and skills. The first such Cultural space to be registered in Brazil were the rapids of Ipanoré. 4 The couple in question were Jacinto Cruz, Pira-tapuia, and Eulalia Almeida, Tariana (Erivaldo Almeida, personal communication; Martini 2009). 5 As federal redistribution of tax money to municipalities and schools is proportional to its inhabitants and enrolled students, respectively, it is not unheard of that, whenever they can, municipalities may significantly inflate their numbers. 6 Although hallucinogenic yagé (Banisteriopsis caapi) was traditionally used by Indigenous societies on the Upper Rio Negro (see, e.g., S. Hugh-Jones 1979), its use seems to have declined. In the southwest Amazonian State of Acre, in contrast, it has gained terrain and legitimacy. Whether this is a result of the stronger control exercised by Salesians or not is hard to decide. Stephen Hugh-Jones also mentions dreams among the Barasana as a way to directly contact the He state (247). 7 The Rio Negro was from the seventeenth century on an extractive resource field for the colonists. Yet the main extraction at stake concerned manpower, as Indians were enslaved or lured into “descending” close to colonial establishments (Meira 2000). Rubber and piassava extraction up until very recent times followed the same pattern of recruiting labour upriver, although relocation would now be at a closer range.

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8 The Dom Bosco Salesians are a missionary and educational society founded by the Piedmontese John Bosco (later Saint John Bosco) and were recognized by the Vatican in 1873. 9 These data come from the Central Salesian Archives in Rome, particularly A8630609/1975 and A8630701. 10 It would be worth understanding why Salesians from the same Italian province appeared to be less successful among the Bororo in Mato Grosso and why Salesians from Ecuador were, at about the same time, giving full support to Indigenous movements such as the Shuars’. 11 Two centuries earlier, in 1759, Jesuits were expelled from Brazil on the charges that they did not adequately serve Portugal’s interests. They were suspected of having political plans of their own for the Amazon. They introduced a lingua franca in the region derived from an Indigenous language rather than bringing in Portuguese. 12 The website is archived at https://web.archive.org/ web/20090213173014/http://palavravivadedeus.com.br/livrogrande/ praia.htm. Although Deus can be both Latin and Portuguese for God, it was commonly understood that God had signed His name in Portuguese, and His linguistic affiliation did not seem to deserve any commentary. 13 A picture of this image was posted on his website, which is now archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20090215114817/http://palavravivadedeus.com.br/livrogrande/milagre.htm. 14 Messianic movements in the region have been extensively studied by Robin Wright in his doctoral dissertation and in numerous publications. Unless otherwise noted, he is my source of data on the topic. 15 Long before anthropologists took up that interpretation, an artistic (though ethnographically inspired) thematization of Indigenous cannibalism was submitted. Anthropophagy was introduced in the early 1920s by modernist writers, poets, and visual artists as an icon for Brazilian appropriation, digestion, and transformation of foreign art currents. 16 On that topic and the fickleness of Brazilian Indians’ conversion in the sixteenth century, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1993). 17 Fragments of the True Cross made for highly coveted and widely distributed relics all over Europe, and the legend of its finding was famously illustrated by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo. 18 On the history of this museum, see Andrello and Ferreira (2015). 19 Repatriation was followed by the death of Erivaldo, a leader of FOIRN closely involved with the process. Coincidently, he was the son of the elderly couple from Iauaretê who donated the image of the Santinha. The young anthropologist who followed the events and reported them, André Martini, also died shortly after.



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20 I have similarly pointed to a disparity of regimes in the expansion of orixá-worshipping religions from West Africa to Brazil. The adherence to “traditional” ritual behaviour in the New World obscures profound organizational differences. West African orixá-worship, coterminous with lineages or towns, turned into a universalistic religion in Brazil; conversely, the Catholicism adhered to by returnees from Brazil to the West Coast of Africa was understood to be, in West African fashion, exclusive to that community (Carneiro da Cunha 1985). 21 I wish to very warmly thank Geraldo Andrello and Alicia Rolla who spotted all these places on the map for me.

7 The Past Is Old, the Future Is Traditional: Ircenrraat, the DOT, and the Inventiveness of Tradition Ann Fienup-Riordan I never heard the word “culture” used in southwest Alaska thirty years ago – today it is on everyone’s lips. Conscious culture is the trademark of the new millennium in Alaska as elsewhere, requiring effort to preserve and reproduce past practices and defend them against assimilative pressures. In this struggle, as Marshall Sahlins (2000b: 196) says so well, “the continuity of indigenous cultures consists in the specific ways they change.” This essay explores one such struggle – a debate over road-building – as an example of what Sahlins (2000b: 192) and others have called “culturalism,” that is, the self-conscious, deliberate use of identity, culture, and heritage in gaining recognition of a distinctive way of life. The Arctic generally has attracted scholars most interested in the ingenuity of Inuit survival and the concept of culture as adaptive response. Much less attention has been given to local understandings of heritage and how people interpret and use their own history. The emphasis here will be on cultural creativity rather than ecological fit. It is particularly important to give Arctic flesh to the bones of this argument, as so often non-Native understandings of the Far North have been reduced to the description of subsistence cycles. In 2005 the Alaska Department of Transportation (DOT) began plans to build a 15-mile highway on the Bering Sea coast to connect several Nelson Island villages. The route DOT chose ran directly over the homes of ircenrraat (other-than-human persons) also believed to



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Figure 7.1.  Nelson Island place names. Drawn by Michael Knapp.

be resident on Nelson Island. Not surprisingly, community members voiced concerns about this project. While invoking shared traditions, however, Nelson Islanders do not all come to the same conclusions. Yet if we listen closely, their public conversations provide a modern means for the traditional ends of consensus building and recognition of wider social responsibilities (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2).

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Figure 7.2.  Qasginguaq, June 2009. Photo by Ann Fienup-Riordan.

Tracks on the Tundra The low, windswept tundra of southwest Alaska’s Bering Sea coast presents a deceptively inhospitable face to the first-time visitor. In fact, the land and sea abound with seals, walrus, beluga, herring, salmon, halibut, ptarmigan, geese, ducks, berries, and greens gathered during the annual harvesting cycle. The Yup’ik people of Nelson Island – living in the villages of Toksook Bay, Tununak, and Nightmute, with a combined population of about 1,100 – are able to fill their freezers and storehouses with more than 600 pounds per person of subsistence resources. Because they use powerboats, rifles, and snowmobiles, they must earn money for equipment and fuel by working within the local wage economy. People’s success at harvesting animals is directly tied to their ability to harvest cash. Today money is increasingly hard to come by, and hunting and fishing are often difficult to afford. I first lived in Toksook Bay during the 1970s, doing fieldwork and trying to learn the Yup’ik language (Fienup-Riordan 1983). Since then I have lived in Anchorage and continued to work as a cultural anthropologist in southwest Alaska. Through the early 1990s, the



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projects I undertook were largely of my own making – a missionary history, a book on Yup’ik cosmology, a harvest disruption study, and a book on the popular representation of Alaska Natives in the movies (Fienup-Riordan 1986, 1991, 1994, 1995). Beginning in 1992, Yup’ik community members have invited me to help them with projects of their own, and since 1999 most of my work has been carried out in collaboration with the Calista Elders Council, the primary heritage organization for the Yup’ik region (Fienup-Riordan 1996, 2005a, 2005b, 2007; Fienup-Riordan and Rearden 2012; Meade and Fienup-Riordan 2005; Rearden and Fienup-Riordan 2011, 2013, 2014). In February 2006 I travelled to Toksook for the first time in three years. My excuse was the annual Kassiyuk (Dance Festival), but visiting friends was just as important. During my absence Toksook had built a new community hall, a fifteen-bed subregional clinic, an airfield, three wind generators, and a tank farm, and it had added high-speed Internet access. One project still in the works was a system of roads that the Alaska State Department of Transportation (DOT) proposed to connect the island’s villages as well as the summer fish camp of Umkumiut, three miles west of Toksook Bay. This intervillage gravel highway would be the first of its kind in southwest Alaska. In winter trucks travel an ice highway between the regional centre of Bethel and nearby villages, but otherwise boats, planes, and snowmobiles provide the only means of transportation between the region’s fifty-six villages. When I arrived at Toksook, I headed for Paul and Martina John’s house and received a warm welcome. Before I could take off my coat, their daughter, Jolene, guided me into the back bedroom to show me something on the computer. On screen I saw a mixture of human and animal tracks in an area of bright white snow. Orange tape had been staked around them to keep people from adding their tracks to the ones in the photo. Jolene told me that her uncle, Joe Henry, who lived in a house 300 yards from the Johns, had discovered the unusual tracks in newly fallen snow outside his house. The tracks showed paw prints, which changed back and forth from human to animal tracks, then eventually disappeared. Many Nelson Islanders visited the site to see the tracks, and photographs were later published in the Bethel newspaper, the Tundra Drums (Active 2006). Many believed that the tracks had been made by ircenrraat,

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small people who live in hilly areas and can appear in either animal or human form.

Ircenrraat and Other Persons The implicit distinction between humans and animals in Western thought belies the complex relationships between numerous categories of persons in the Yup’ik view of the world. Many understand the world as inhabited by a variety of persons, including human persons, non-human persons (animals), and extraordinary or otherthan-human persons, such as ircenrraat (plural), cingssiiget (small persons with pointed heads), and qununit (seal people). Appearances are often deceiving. A man encountered on the tundra might be an ircenrraq (singular) in human form. Wolf cubs playing in the grass might be ircenrraat in animal incarnation. Ircenrraat are believed to possess a mixture of traits requiring special treatment. Like human and animal persons, they possess both mind and awareness and, so, merit careful treatment and respect. Ircenrraat are said to live underground and are still sometimes encountered. Stories of those who have visited them describe a world both like and unlike its human counterpart, where a year is experienced as a single day. Although non-human persons often have special traits, they are not considered to be supernatural but rather part of the world that may or may not be experienced. Many detailed accounts describe encounters with such persons. Yup’ik parents continue to tell these stories so that young people will know how to act if they have such an experience. Although sightings of ircenrraat are not as common as they were in the past, their tracks and footprints are still found, along with an occasional tool or piece of clothing. People also sometimes hear the singing, stamping, and thumping of ircenrraat, proof that they are still present in the land. In the past, when the earth was thin (nuna-gguq mamkitellruuq tamani, from nuna, “land,” and mamkite, “flat object that is thin”), encounters with unusual persons were more common. According to the late Brentina Chanar (born 1912) of Toksook Bay (interview, 4 February, 1991): Kegluneq said that her grandmother used to say that long ago when the land was thin, things like that used to appear …



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When it was thin and when it freezes, you know things going on top of it become resonant. You could also easily hear people walking outside. At that particular time, apparitions became numerous, what they call carayiit [literally, “terrible, fearsome things”]. So when the soil was thin skinned, those footsteps would wake them up. Ircenrraat are the most commonly reported of these extraordinary persons. Brentina Chanar stated that they appear as ordinary people. Although she had not seen them herself, she had heard their songs – proof of their reality. Others say they are small people, two to three feet high, and as early as 1899 the Smithsonian ethnographer Edward Nelson (1983 [1899]: 480) described them as dwarves. Occasionally a person encounters ircenrraat as yuut (people) and later sees them as wolves or foxes or other small mammals. At other times humans encounter wolves or foxes who later reveal themselves as ircenrraat. When people encounter an ircenrraq, they may at first perceive it as a normal person. Although ircenrraat can appear anywhere, they generally prefer hilly areas which some people believe are their houses, including specific places like the hilltop knob known as Qasginguaq, about 5 miles northeast of Toksook. The name “Qasginguaq” translates as “place that looks like a qasgi or communal men’s house,” referring to the belief that the knob is the semi-subterranean home of ircenrraat. Many Nelson Islanders revere the mountain for this reason. Although people usually encounter ircenrraat in the human world, some stories tell how a person travelling in the hills happens on the window or door to the world of the ircenrraat. That person might look through that opening for what seems like only a moment but it is actually much longer. The late Frances Usugan (born 1915) of Toksook Bay related (on 22 July 1985) how her older brother, Cyril Chanar (born 1909), heard the songs of the ircenrraat while they were celebrating in their underground qasgi within Qasginguaq. What were those ircenrraat in the times through which we came? My brother, Cyril Chanar, from Qasginguaq he heard drums and singing.

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And when winter came, during the time they had Kevgiq [Messenger Feast], they had songs that were from the ircenrraat. It is said that when one hears ircenrraat singing like that, they always learn them right away. This event occurred when Cyril Chanar was a young man in the early 1930s. Nelson Islanders still recall his experience and the songs he learned there. A person might also visit ircenrraat in their homes, where the human visitor could see his hosts as people. The visitor’s ability to return to the human world depended on his reception. Frances Usugan (on 22 July 1985) shared a story of a nukalpiaq (successful hunter and provider) who was taken into the world of the ircenrraat. He was wearing a patchwork parka made of different animal skins. When the ircenrraat asked about them, he said that each represented the catch of a relative. Worried that the nukalpiaq was a powerful man with a large family, the ircenrraat decided to release him. Three doors led out of their underground qasgi, and he was instructed to exit through the middle door back to the earth’s surface. Had he gone through the lower door, he would have remained underground, while the upper door led into the sky. Some people say that if a person brings something back from the ircenrraat, such as a tool or piece of clothing, it will bring good luck to its owner. Possession of the hunting tool of an ircenrraq, for example, will make that person a better hunter. People may also acquire good fortune by exchanging something with an ircenrraq. Eddie Alexie of Togiak told the story of a man who killed a caribou and then fell asleep. Two people (who were actually ircenrraat) appeared to him and said that they wanted to trade for his catch. When he awoke, his caribou was gone, but the following spring he was able to catch beluga whales, which had avoided him in the past but were an animal form that ircenrraat sometimes assume. Many accounts of encounters with ircenrraat contain the implicit moral that if animals are treated poorly, their “persons” would call the offender to account. The late Billy Lincoln (born 1906) of Toksook Bay related (on 21 July 1985) the well-known story of a man’s encounter with wolves (actually ircenrraat), who took him into their



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underground world. When they finally allowed him to leave, he was told to somersault four times. Sitting up he saw that he had emerged in front of his house, but everything there had become old in his absence. Although he had only experienced a single day with the ircenrraat, he had actually been gone an entire year. Ircenrraat might also take the form of killer whales, and rules forbid hunting or injuring these whales for that reason. Anyone who did so doomed an immediate family member to die. According to Frances Usugan (as told on July 1985): Those down there, the ones they refer to as Kalukaat, at the bend, when we go around them, the ones high up there, they say that they are ircenrraat. And these killer whales, they say they are ircenrraat. And down there at the bend, when a person hears them, after they make kayak sounds, the killer whales resubmerge from near the shore, going out to sea. These are the people of Kalukaat who make kayak sounds as ones who are preparing, even though they have not seen anything, the killer whales resubmerge going out, from near the shore here. Finally, ircenrraat are believed to reveal people’s future, as in this account by Brentina Chanar (from 4 February 1991): Those ircenrraat revealed the future of the village that they will experience later on. When we used to stay at Nunakauyak [the present site of Toksook Bay] and it was fall, when it got dark, your father would go out and come in and say, “There beyond Qemqeng, two lights

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were travelling very fast and then disappeared. And now there is a flashlight coming down on this side of Nialruq!” But when we went out to check, we did not see it. And sometimes, from the end of Qemqeng, we would hear something roaring. And across from us there would be lights, but nothing would happen to us. And now Ski-dos make light going across there and coming down from Nialruq. I used to suspect that [ircenrraat] revealed what was to be and roaring Ski-dos approaching! … It was probably them, revealing what people will do, the coming generation. Indeed, the lights Brentina Chanar observed along the trail leading down from Qasginguaq may have revealed a future yet to come.

Building Roads and Building Consensus on Nelson Island The weekend dance festival drew to a close. As other guests and I prepared to leave, bad weather closed in, and planes did not fly for the next week. On Monday morning I was at the Johns’, listening to casual conversation around the kitchen table. The phone rang, and to my surprise it was a woman from the Department of Transportation asking me to help them out. She said that they needed me to act as their expert to solve the “problem of Qasginguaq.” I told her that I would try to help but that I had no expert capacity or decisionmaking power in Toksook. I said I would visit the Nunakauyak Traditional Council office and see what I could learn. The “problem of Qasginguaq” revolved around the proposed right-of-way and material site for the Nelson Island roadway. DOT engineers had designed the 15-mile road connecting Toksook and Nightmute to run right over Qasginguaq. Engineers also suggested that the knob’s abundant gravel near the proposed road would make an ideal material site, potentially providing gravel for the entire highway project, estimated to cost in excess of 50 million dollars. During summer 2005 field reconnaissance, Braund and Associates (2005a, 2005b) surveyed the right-of-way and identified the potential historic and prehistoric value of small rock structures on Qasginguaq, including three rock cairns and a circular stone structure. Further conversations with Nelson Islanders revealed that the cairns were recently constructed, probably by young people. David



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Hooper of Tununak reported that the stone circle was made by National Guardsmen during training exercises on Nelson Island. Nelson Islanders did not consider either of these structures, created from loose surface stones found on the hilltop, as historically or culturally significant. During discussions about these stone structures, however, it became apparent that while Nelson Islanders do not give them cultural significance, they do place considerable value on Qasginguaq itself. Prompted by their practical need to document the traditional significance that contemporary Nelson Islanders place on Qasging­ uaq before preceding with the Nelson Island roadway, DOT had tracked me down and given me a call. I knew all this before the phone call, as ircenrraat in general and Qasginguaq in particular had been the topic of many conversations during the previous week. I walked to the traditional council office, where I told Jolene John – who worked as the tribal administrator – about the call from DOT. She, in fact, had recommended that they contact me. I mentioned my reluctance to say anything to DOT unless it reflected community views. Jolene agreed and told me that a Toksook town meeting fortuitously was scheduled for that afternoon. She suggested putting Qasginguaq on the agenda, and made several announcements in Yup’ik over the CB radio to encourage community members as well as Nightmute people who had stayed overnight following the dance to attend the meeting. I was given permission to record the discussion, which was carried out in the Yup’ik language. More than forty men and a handful of women gathered at the new community hall. Elders sat at the back of the room, and middleaged men and women farther forward. Boys from the high school basketball team later filed in and took places in the front row, but said not a word. The presence of men and boys in this public space mirrored the past. Through the 1930s, boys lived and worked in the qasgi, where they received practical training from community elders as well as oral instruction, viewed as the moral foundation of a properly lived life. Qasgit (plural) continued to be used into the 1950s. With the introduction of single-family dwellings and formal education, however, they were no longer the primary places where men lived and worked together, educating their younger generation. The town hall meeting evoked this traditional context both in form and content. The community hall became “like a qasgi”

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when elders and young people gathered there, and this referent grounded everything they said. At the outset Toksook Bay Tribal Council President David Tim emphasized that DOT would respect the opinions of community members. He stated, “Those who are working on [the road] are relying on us because we know things from the past; they do not want to do something without having asked us, since we know the route of the road. Because they are doing that, we Yupiit [Yup’ik people] are the determining factors.” Community members, in turn, deferred to elders present at the meeting and gave their advice priority. Testimony confirmed residents’ views on the continued presence of ircenrraat on Nelson Island and their close association with Qasginguaq. Mark John stated, “Since I have come to exist, they have mentioned Qasginguaq many times. And when I was able to go by dog team, whenever I went near it, I used to think about it being the land of the ircenrraat. If an area close to Qasginguaq is devastated, it might be disturbing, knowing the ways of our ancestors. It is included in stories, and Yupiit know that Qasginguaq up there as a significant landmark.” Toksook Bay elder James Charlie agreed: Our ancestors, before we started talking about God or heaven, said that a person who dies goes to a designated place here in Nelson Island. They go to Kalukaat and also farther up from Tununak, and so they go there and become ircenrraat. And that Qasginguaq, just like Mark said, it is like a “spiritual site” or a “sacred site.” From time immemorial our ancestors have said that not only Kalukaat but also some places on the side of the mountain are the lands of ircenrraat. Toksook Bay Traditional Chief Paul John (born 1928) also identified ircenrraat with killer whales, as Frances Usugan had twenty years before: “They say the Kalukaat are the original place of the killer whales. They call the rocks on the steep part on top of our mountain Kalukaat. They have been the land of the ircenrraat for centuries. They are killer whales … and they sometimes make thundering sounds when something is going to happen.” Camilius Tulik of Nightmute agreed: “When they had a qasgi in Umkumiut, they prohibited us from bothering those killer whales. When they were talking about ircenrraat at Qasginguaq, they also talked about those



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killer whales. Those black killer whales belong to Qasginguaq.” Thomas Jumbo, also from Nightmute, described the door by which killer whales disappear into the land: “There is a door just this side of Ulurruk. So these killer whales are ircenrraat. Even though they submerge near the edge of the shore, they go in [to the land]; that is their house, it is their village.” During the meeting consensus emerged that Qasginguaq was a traditional landmark and culturally valuable site and should be protected. Participants also recognized the importance of the new road. Camilius Tulik stated: I have lived in this place called Nelson Island ever since I was small and nowhere else. All of us here on Nelson Island know and have heard about these they call ircenrraat. Whatever we are going to use, they say that ircenrraat use them first. So what [ircenrraat] pointed out is indeed true. But I am in support of [the road]. This road will be used by those who come after us here on Nelson Island. Paul John agreed: “That road may be okay if the bottom [of Qasginguaq] is not destroyed, if they bypass Qasginguaq.” Mark John added, “If they disturb the land, I do not want them to take gravel from close [to Qasginguaq]. I want them to take gravel for the road from far away.” Again, James Charlie voiced his support of this position, noting that the road is important, but that Yup’ik ways must also be preserved. It would be okay if the road could be on this side [of the mountain]. But the ones who know about it should be asked about how far from [Qasginguaq] it should be built, I think that will be better. This road will undoubtedly help us but our ways should not be sacrificed, especially our traditional values. It is possible to [build the road], so instead of getting gravel from the top of [Qasginguaq], it might be better to get it farther away from it, keeping in mind our ancestors. Camilius Tulik concluded, “I wanted to talk to you about how we will all use that road. At Nightmute they said that if they are going to take [materials] from near Qasginguaq, it should not be close. If

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we work on it collectively, we will do it properly. It will be fine if it is done like that, by talking about it like this beforehand. So write to those people saying that is the way they want to do it.” Having confirmed (1) that Qasginguaq was a culturally significant site and (2) that the new road should be built without disturbing Qasginguaq, discussion turned to the question of how far the road should be built from Qasginguaq. Participants discussed the matter at length and agreed that the road should be built as far away as possible on the downhill slope away from Qasginguaq and no closer than 1,500 feet from the perimeter of the knob, located approximately 2,000 feet from the hilltop. Finally, Charlie Moses of Toksook Bay suggested a possible new material site behind Qasginguaq: That future road that will come from Nightmute will go by in front of Qasginguaq. It will go inland when it nears Qalulleq [River], and it will cross [the stream] toward its source. From that point, they could go to that material site starting from its inland location. It will be better if it went that way. Instead of getting [road material] from near Qasginguaq, they could go to that material site up there when they start to take rocks. It could be like that. Phillip Moses agreed with Charlie Moses’ recommendation: “That small hill at the source of Qalulleq will be filled with rocks. That hill just at the source of Qalulleq is not small. It is under Qasginguaq, down from the proposed road. If it has good rocks, even if it is used, it will not be missed if it is gone. But it will be a reason to be grateful.” Camilius Tulik concluded: “So if we come to one mind [in agreement], it will be ideal.”

Traditional Landscapes from Contemporary Yup’ik and Non-Yup’ik Points of View Although discussion at the Toksook town hall meeting clarifies some points, much was left unsaid. Building consensus regarding Qasginguaq was as complex as building the road itself.



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People agreed that Qasginguaq is a location possessing longstanding value. It is the site of past encounters with ircenrraat, who many still believe make it their home. The ancestors of present-day Nelson Islanders, including the late Cyril Chanar, saw and heard ircenrraat at Qasginguaq, and their encounters are still widely known. Contemporary Nelson Islanders, including Traditional Chief Paul John, have observed lights and other activity by ircenrraat at Qasginguaq from a distance. Today, looking northeast from Toksook Bay, Qasginguaq appears on the landscape in the same form as it has for centuries. It is an easily recognizable knob, highly visible from the village. Travellers have piled surface rocks into several small cairns and low structures, but no one has dug below its surface into the ircenrraat’s underground home. Contemporary recognition of ircenrraat as active agents present on Nelson Island provides strong evidence of the continued relevance of Yup’ik understandings of personhood. All persons – human, non-human, and other-than-human – are believed to possess awareness and merit respect. A Yup’ik adage captures this shared personhood: “Ella-gguq allamek yuituq” (The world, they say, is occupied by persons and no others). This qanruyun (instruction) eloquently underscores both the common kinship between humans as well as the common personhood of all creatures. Although most Nelson Islanders share a common view of personhood, they come to different conclusions. Some oppose roadbuilding on the island, not only because of negative effects on the land and those who live within it but also its potential impacts on human communities. The new road may lead to consolidation of services, closure of schools and clinics in Tununak and Nightmute, and forced reliance on centralized facilities at Toksook. Most Toksook residents oppose such centralization, for good cultural reasons. Toksook has a Yup’ik immersion program in its elementary school, and residents actively support use of the Yup’ik language in many contexts. Tununak and Nightmute do not have Yup’ik immersion programs in their schools, and their young people increasingly speak English. Although near neighbours geographically, the three Nelson Island villages have very different visions of themselves and their futures. Toksook, for one, prefers independence in the name of cultural survival.

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Toksook residents recently have been joined in their resistance to the road project by representatives of the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Nelson Island is part of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, in which more than a million ducks and half-amillion geese breed annually (US Fish and Wildlife Service 2002). Refuge managers are concerned that the traffic and noise of road construction and use will cause environmental damage in the birds’ sensitive nesting grounds. Yup’ik resistance to USFWS regulation of waterfowl hunting is long-standing and well documented (Fienup-Riordan 1999). In brief, non-Native wildlife biologists tend to view the birds as scarce resources requiring management, whereas Yup’ik hunters view them as persons who can legitimately be hunted anytime they present themselves. Many Nelson Islanders believe that like all animals, birds observe what is done to their carcasses and communicate with others of their kind. Whereas non-Native biologists advocate limited hunting as a remedy for declining bird populations, Yup’ik hunters continue to view the relationship between humans and animals as collaborative reciprocity by which animals give themselves to humans in response to respectful treatment as persons (albeit non-human) in their own right. Mike Uttereyuk, Sr (interview, March 1995) of Scammon Bay described hunting for geese north of his village: After we killed lots in one year, there would be a lot more returning the next year. That was how it was … Today, since we don’t catch as much as we used to, the population of geese has declined. The amount of geese we kill is usually replaced. If we killed lots, they would be replaced by many more when they returned. That was how it was! Because white men are keeping a close eye on them … they are making the goose population decrease. Uttereyuk’s conclusion – that the recent population decline is the direct result of limited harvests – highlights a fundamental conflict between the Western scientific view of geese and that held by many contemporary Yupiit. Wildlife managers maintain that overhunting and overharvesting are major factors contributing to the decline of goose populations along the Bering Sea coast (Sedinger et al. 1993). For Uttereyuk and many of his generation overharvesting by Yup’ik hunters is not to blame but rather the limited harvests that insult the geese, causing them to go elsewhere.



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In the context of this long-standing debate, it is remarkable for some Nelson Islanders to join forces with non-Native refuge personnel. It is, however, a pragmatic partnership. In choosing to work with the biologists Nelson Islanders are not forsaking their traditional view of personhood but accepting support from non-Native conservationists whose practical concerns overlap theirs. On the other side of the debate are Nelson Islanders (especially Nightmute residents) for whom the new road will halve the miles to open water for seal hunting and fishing – traditional activities performed today with the help of modern tools. Not only will the new road cut fuel bills (gas is up to $6.00 a gallon in the village), the sale of gravel (located on village corporation land) and the use of local labour during road construction will help the village economy. Residents assume that the state will contract with locals for road maintenance as well. This position does not negate belief in or disrespect for ircenrraat, as Camilius Tulik reasoned, “Ircenrraat never told us not to.”

A Person’s Mind Is Powerful The emphasis above has been on the broad conceptualization of personhood to include other-than-human persons. According to this view, human persons also require careful treatment. To guide people in their relations with each other, the Yupiit codified detailed qanruyutet (instructions) for the culturally appropriate living of life (Fienup-Riordan 2005a). Although the multitude of qanruyutet took a lifetime to learn, they can be thought about in terms of a small number of basic rules flowing directly from the Yup’ik concept of a powerful mind. The foremost admonition was for a person to act with compassion, sharing with and helping those in need. “Those who share,” they say, “are given another day.” Second, people were taught to control their own thoughts and feelings, avoiding private conflict and public confrontation. As they say, “Braid your anger in your hair so that it will not become loose.” These two admonishments  – to act with compassion and restraint  – reflect neither selfless altruism nor passive acquiescence. Rather, both are a direct response to the Yup’ik understanding of the positive and negative powers of the human mind. To act with compassion elicits the gratitude of those one helps and brings the power of their minds to bear on one’s future success. To act selfishly or in anger, on the other hand, injures the minds of one’s fellows and

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produces dangerous negative effects. This immediate and tangible reciprocity is at the core of Yup’ik social and emotional life. Theresa Moses elaborated (on 5 June 1995) this relational morality and the power of a person’s emotional response: They say a person’s gratitude is powerful. They say their feelings of humiliation are also powerful. They taught us how to use discretion among our fellows and try not to say things that might hurt their feelings. They’d say that a person’s feelings of gratitude and humiliation were very strong. When someone does something that makes me very grateful, sometimes the only thing I can do is to hope for their well-being. Sometimes my feelings are so strong, I weep. Since a person’s gratitude is truly powerful, his feelings of humiliation are also profound. When we were offended, instead of becoming haughty, we were taught to have self-control. The view of society Theresa reflects is fundamentally relational rather than individualistic. A person is not first and foremost an individual who “relates” to others as a secondary activity. Rather, a Yup’ik person comes into the world as part of a complex web of kinship, including both human and non-human persons. One always considers these others and, for better or worse, reaps the consequences. The deference and respectful treatment of fellow community members that were the defining characteristics of the Toksook town hall meeting reflect this view. Decision making on Nelson Island was in the past and continues today to be consensus based. No outside expert can resolve issues for Nelson Islanders, but public discussion can facilitate coming to practical agreement in a respectful manner.

The Future Is Traditional The Toksook town hall meeting mirrors “culturalism” worldwide. Elders today embody past authority, talking in a new venue about traditional values that continue to animate relations between people, animals, and the land. Their efforts represent “a permutation of older forms and relationships made appropriate to novel situations” (Sahlins 1999c: 408). In southwest Alaska, as elsewhere, local differentiation and expressions of cultural distinctiveness have accompanied global integration and homogenization. Sahlins (399) argues



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persuasively against “the easy functional dismissal of people’s claims to cultural distinction (the so-called invention of tradition) and for the continued relevance of such distinctions (the inventiveness of tradition).” Nelson Islanders would agree with him. The elders’ vigorous speech regarding both ircenrraat and Qasginguaq is much more than backward-looking conservatism or nostalgia for the past. Their oratory, both “authentic” and “innovative,” displays a new self-consciousness and increased awareness of how they and their descendants are both like and unlike the encapsulating kass’aq (non-Native) majority, a dialectic of similarity and difference that is the hallmark of every “living tradition” (Sahlins 1999c: 411). Stressing the importance of holding onto one’s traditions, and working together “with one mind,” their contemporary narrative references to the past are active efforts to shape the future – a future in which they envision Yup’ik traditions as playing an important part. One final irony is noteworthy in this regard, testament to the complicated roles we anthropologists increasingly play. Following the Toksook town hall meeting, DOT asked me to write a report clarifying what Nelson Islanders had said. If Qasginguaq had cultural significance, they needed to know before moving ahead with their project. I wrote the report on behalf of the Nunakauyak Traditional Council. Council members were hopeful that what elders had shared would result in the designation of Qasginguaq as a Traditional Cultural Property (TCP) under the federal register. Such a designation – to date only bestowed twice in Alaska – would protect it in perpetuity from road building and future development projects. The value they placed on Qasginguaq could only translate into its designation as a Traditional Cultural Property if the DOT had that information in black and white. Using elders’ testimony I was able to make a strong case for the continued cultural significance of Qasginguaq. DOT presented the report to the Alaska State Department of History and Archaeology, and Qasginguaq was, in fact, declared eligible as a Traditional Cultural Property, the first step in the designation process. This was good news to Nelson Islanders, who wanted Qasginguaq protected, and to the DOT, which wanted to build the road. Once the site’s eligibility was established, DOT was required to treat it as a fully designated Traditional Cultural Property. DOT could now move forward with their project, which had been on hold while the status of Qasginguaq was

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in limbo. Declaring Qasginguaq eligible as a Traditional Cultural Property in effect paved the way for the new road. Nelson Islanders’ decision would be respected: If the road were built, Qasginguaq would be protected. In the state and federal regulatory process, the future is Tradition, writ large. In the end, the Toksook town hall meeting and its aftermath provides one of numerous examples of cultural revitalization and self-awareness. While many predicted that globalization would put an end to distinctive traditions, instead Indigenous people all over the globe have sought to appropriate the world in their own terms (Sahlins 2000b: 192). In southwest Alaska as elsewhere, expressions of cultural distinctiveness have grown up alongside increased global integration. For all their new connectedness – a state-ofthe-arts clinic, Internet access, direct air service to Anchorage – the continued relevance of traditional admonitions, many feel, cannot be denied. As Sahlins notes, the contemporary emphasis on traditional values reflects both ethnonationalism and political activism among numerous Indigenous peoples, including the Yupiit. Elders like Paul John and Camilius Tulik have strong political agendas, seeking not merely to revive selected practices but to vindicate them after a century of dismissal and condemnation. Here again Yup’ik elders are not unique but rather join Indigenous peoples worldwide who selfconsciously counterpoise their traditions “to the forces of Western imperialism … not merely to mark their identity but to seize their destiny” (Sahlins 2000b: 163). The Toksook town hall meeting not only discussed specific traditions surrounding Qasginguaq, but also revived the creative context of Yup’ik oratory, providing a public space for elders to perform their traditional roles as speakers and teachers. This instrumental character was reflected not only in the content of what elders said, especially their persistent references to traditional values and ancestral ways, but the meeting’s public form. Gathering together and openly speaking about their past, elders were actively endeavouring to shape their future. Many cases of cultural revival are spearheaded by younger men and women who champion “tradition” at odds with parents who had “accommodated to the white man and internalized the latter’s reproaches” (Sahlins 2000b: 198). But in this case, tradition-bearing elders on Nelson Island are truly leading the charge, as they



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have retained both knowledge of their past and a passionate desire to communicate it. For them, as for Indigenous leaders elsewhere, “culture is not only a heritage, it is a project,” a demand for specific forms of modernity that can only be fulfilled if the next generation shares their view of the world, that is, their culture (200). Elders at the town hall meeting discussed their differences in a group setting, as was traditional, based on their own personal experience: “I tell what I know.” Like good “afterologists,” Sahlin’s (1999c: 404) term for postmodern, post-colonial, post-structuralist thinkers, they made no claims to completeness or to imparting the one true faith. Their sense of their own culture was neither essentialist nor bounded, and the emphasis was not on presenting a unified, homogeneous, systematic view (as in some instances of cultural revival and renewal). Elders met together to talk about their past. They described their own experiences and listened to others. Knowledge was not viewed as the property of particular individuals but a shared experience gained in one’s engagement with the world and with each other. Nelson Island elders continue to see themselves as living in a world of local, face-to-face relations radically different from the national and anonymous relations that characterize the non-Native world. They view the DOT’s Traditional Cultural Property designation as a means to an end, not an end in itself. In their world, compassionate personal relations, including talking to young people and to each other, are the real keys to cultural survival. Their words continue to have value. At the end of the town hall meeting, younger Nelson Islanders expressed their gratitude to the elders for what they had shared, thoughtfully remarking that someday in the future they would be the ones talking to the younger generation. In fact, the future is now. Over the last decade, regional organizations and programs have put increasing emphasis on community and regional gatherings where both elders and young people speak out. At these gatherings elders publicly discuss practices hidden from the view of a generation of younger Yupiit, and their oratory continues to have moral weight. Issues of environmental transformation continue to be subtly contested on the Bering Sea coast, where the Nelson Island road project promises to reshape landscape in unprecedented ways. What some non-Natives (and Yupiit) view as acceptable progress – “Ircenrraat never told us not to” – some Yupiit (and non-Natives)

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view as potentially dangerous disturbance of the habitations of other-than-human persons with whom they coexist in a sentient world. If state funding becomes available, the road will probably be built. Until then, community discussion will continue. The tracks under Joe Henry’s window provide local evidence that ircenrraat inhabit the world, and the actions of ircenrraat may affect those who encounter them. Nelson Islanders also take responsibility for ircenrraat. Ethical practices on Nelson Island continue to be conceived in terms of this larger social framework, including human and non-human persons. Community debate on the transformation of their landscape continues to be guided by a relational ethic all but invisible to US Fish and Wildlife Servies and Alaska’s Department of Transportation. This debate is neither about conservation, as understood by USFWS biologists, nor development, as defined by DOT. At the Toksook town hall meeting, men told stories of ircenrraat, not as history lessons but as evidence to remind fellow humans of their wider social responsibilities. Acknowledgments I am indebted to the Nunakauyak Traditional Council for permission to attend and record their town hall meeting, and to share the results of what I learned. Thanks to David Chanar of Toksook Bay for his translations of elders’ accounts. And special thanks to Alex Golub for the invitation to contribute to this volume in honour of the anthropologist and teacher I most respect and admire.

8 The Kafka Connection: Structure, Lifeworld, and the Cunning of History Jonathan Friedman Marshall Sahlins has been one of the few anthropologists and certainly the most celebrated to have continued the tradition of argument and scientific reason that has been in large part abandoned in recent years by so many intellectuals. The tradition, if I may use such a dangerous term, consists in finding structure in reality. All structure is underlying insofar as it is not obvious “to the most casual observer.” It takes a great deal of work to arrive at structural understanding, and even then it is always in the form of hypothesis that is contestable. This is the burden of true science, the unremitting knowledge that one may be wrong. It is only possible when scientists are brave enough to admit to being wrong, usually on the grounds that they can eventually develop a better understanding of the world in the long run. This is surely the core of scientific strategy in the most general sense, an elaboration of trial and error. And Lévi-Strauss would certainly agree, as Sahlins has himself revealed in an interview, when the former stated that of course structuralism ought to be applied to infrastructures and not merely to superstructures. “Just what is structuralism?” “Enfin,” Lévi-Strauss said, “c’est la bonne anthropologie” (Sahlins 2008e: 322). And the usage of the term, if it is to simply be “good anthropology,” refers to a notion of underlying reality, not immediately visible, that is constructed by the anthropologist to account for apparent reality, that is, reality as appearance. It assumes that structure refers to the relational properties of reality, properties that

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are non-empirical in the sense of visibility but quite real, as real as gravity. It is Sahlins’s fearless creativity that is the source of the profound contributions that have transformed the nature of anthropology during the past decades. There have been anti-structuralist movements in anthropology as in other disciplines, but in most cases structuralism has been understood in more culturally specific terms, as superstructure, the structure of representation, as a kind of determinism that seems distasteful to those intellectuals who feel hemmed in by what appear to be forces beyond their control, who long for freedom from all of that. Foucault, who was more of a structuralist than the poststructuralist he has posthumously come to be, is invoked in their vision of language as the totality of the real to be revolted against, even in theory, especially in theory. The paradigm here is Judith Butler (1990, 1993), who seems to see her work as a struggle against definitions and categories, against gender and even sex itself, since all there is, to simplify her approach, are performances, all the rest being externally imposed by the political forces in control of social categorization. There have been since the 1980s a spate of actor-oriented, ethnography-is-all, textualisms inspired by Paul Ricoeur, and new anthropologies or rather ethnographies, since anthropology includes theory that is to be rejected as just more folk-models. Some have seen this shift away from structuralist accounts and all explanation as an expression of another wave of individualization riding the crest of the larger wave of neo-liberalism. Structure, then, is not compatible with my freedom, so it must be banned with all other forms of systemic understanding. And into all of this has been inserted a culturalist globalization vogue borrowed from cultural and postcolonial studies that is totally unconcerned with the structures of real life and more concerned with moralizing statements about the progressive and even evolutionary nature of globalization itself, as opposed to those backward-looking anthropologists who still believe that there is a “local” reality to be understood in its own terms and that some people (dangerous reactionaries) actually defend. This is why globalization proponents have been so negative to global systemic attempts to come to grips with contemporary and historical realities. Is this not a process of the terminal individualization of social thought, what Bruce Kapferer refers to as “the retreat of the social” and here, paradoxically in the name of the global, when, following



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the great global war between diasporas and the nation-state we shall all be free (Appadurai 1996: 21–3)? For, according to Appadurai, “In the longer run, freed from the constraints of the nation form, we may find that cultural freedom and sustainable justice do not presuppose the uniform and general existence of the nation-state” (23). The argument proposed here is that the structural analysis of our own contemporary state- based realities is an important exercise that creates a needed distance from those realities while demonstrating a coherence in reality that is denied in much recent work. This is not a general coherence identical in each society, but the coherence of a family of related forms. This is also an initial effort in which I cannot do much more than suggest what seem to be the possible underlying logics and their particular manifestations. They imply a need for more ethnography, not an ethnography of segregated realities but one that strives to see the connections among disparate phenomena. The aim is to begin to understand the nature of political cultures of modern states and to understand these in their social contexts. There are not mere logics of bureaucracy, of state regulation, or of the formalities of governmentality, but rather of the practical forms of sociality involved in the exercise of state power. The latter are thoroughly cultural insofar as they reveal sets of specific properties that can be understood not only as aspects of particular power structures, but also of more general schemes of sociality. The work of Marshall Sahlins is crucial in the current exercise since he is foremost among those who have engaged the structures of political realities and the cultural logics of power, not least state power. His insistence on not reducing anthropological analysis to the voice of the Native, of maintaining an external perspective as well, invoking Bahktin’s notion of extopy (Sahlins 1997), is fundamental for the kind of analysis suggested here. My approach is initially savage or at least undisciplined insofar as I take certain event chains as the point of departure. Thus, the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh in the Netherlands are paths to the understanding of the organization of the political field of that society that can be engaged in some form of Sahlins’s renowned “method of uncontrolled comparison” to shed light on the way in which different national political arenas can be understood as variants of one another. The “Kafka” in the title of this piece refers to that aspect of social life that makes structuralism

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possible, the fact that free will and intentionality are largely already constituted within cultural frames of reference, that is, they are specific and immediate to the actors who act on free will without their wills being free. This is the tragic aspect of social life in the formal sense: that we know what we are doing but we know little of why we are doing it, nor what our doing does. And in an age when structuralism has been all but eliminated we tend to find ourselves even more deeply embedded in schemes that we feel to be so much our own individual schemes and choices and even strategies, but that are in fact even more embedded in social determinism than in the golden age of the deconstruction of the subject. If we have free will but the will is not free, then we are likely to miss the way in which our own lives are bound up in larger structures and logics that we claim to be the products of our own intentionality. This is the true cunning of Reason and the very reason for the necessity of a structural anthropology or any anthropology that combines the phenomenology of the emic with the “view from afar.”

A Case Study A recent and extremely well-written book by Ian Buruma (2006) explores the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh in Amsterdam and the threats made to Van Gogh’s friend and one-time co-worker, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Buruma does an excellent job of characterizing his own liberal and multicultural position as an intellectual who left the Netherlands as a young man to see a larger world, a positioning that is evident in his characterization of his country of birth as quaint and his own home town as bourgeois and boring – all as opposed to the cosmopolitan space that he adheres to today. It is important to know this since he endeavours at the same time to understand the intentionalities of the actors that he studies in this book. My experiment here consists in using this book, as well as a number of articles from several sources, as a basis for the description of events. I will then suggest that there is a structure to the field of this set of events, one that reveals what can be designated a political culture in transformation. I shall not follow Buruma’s presentation since I am not doing a text analysis, but shall use his material to arrive at a structure that accounts for the events he describes without doing violence to his story.1



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The Murder of Pim Fortuyn Pim Fortuyn was the son of a travelling salesman whom he despised, of a Catholic family in a Protestant town, a homosexual in a heterosexual world, a self-identified outsider in all ways, as he wrote in his autobiography. He became an academic, and was known as a Marxist sociologist. He specialized in being what might be called politically incorrect, and the latter is, of course, a litmus test of the structures of sociality and accepted social order in any society. He dressed extravagantly and he had a white Daimler. He was completely open about his homosexuality and, against what anti-racists would have expected of him, openly spoke of his relations with young Moroccan men. He became a very popular “outsider” politician with support from what might be called the “republican” left, the old culturally liberal, iconoclastic left for which the Netherlands was famous in the 1960s and 1970s. He was also popular with portions of the nationalistic right although he himself would never associate himself with the nationalist figures of Le Pen or Haider. He called for a moratorium on immigration in order to first make sure that the immigrants were fully integrated into Dutch society. His party became the most popular in the country just before he was murdered. His assassin was a vegan, who hated Fortuyn because he flaunted his furs and his luxurious style of consumption. The assassin came from a strongly Protestant and puritan background, and his “green” ideology contained a significant anti-Western component that was counter to the artificial consumer lifestyle that was typical of European societies and which, of course, also exploited nature. So Fortuyn’s assassin was on the side of nature against the excesses of capitalist culture. But he also stated that he wanted to eliminate Fortuyn in order to protect the immigrant population from Fortuyn’s political strategy. Background in Brief The Netherlands was and still is a very wealthy country in which the welfare state of a social democratic variety had been dominant and which had sported a highly liberal attitude to all traditional values, critical of its own puritanism and both generous and open to other cultures and peoples. The glorious period of the 1960s and 1970s was similar in much of Europe, with increasing levels of consumption and higher living standards, in which state transfers successfully

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dampened class differences but also in which class politics was important in the definition of a future utopia of equality and freedom. This situation changed radically with the economic contraction that began at the end of the 1970s in most of Europe and ended in the emergence of “flexibilization” of both capital accumulation and of labour, the massive export of production and jobs, and the effective downward mobility of large sections of the working class, as well as the simultaneous yuppification of the new financial capitalist sectors. In the 1980s and 1990s class relations became increasingly polarized in objective terms at the same time as they were increasingly ignored as a basis for political action. In the earlier period, ethnicity – cultural difference in general – was relatively unmarked in Western Europe, at least in public discourse. In the following period cultural difference replaced class as the dominant discourse. There is a connection with broader global processes in this transformation. The 1980s saw declining hegemony and increasing disorder in large parts of the formerly Western- and Soviet-dominated world, leading to political and cultural fragmentation, to warfare, and to large-scale migration to Europe. Two important changes characterized this new situation, changes to which we return later in the discussion. First, among elites there was a fusion of left and right into a respectable centrist politics. Second, with the decline of modernism, of the ideal of a better world in the future, the past loomed ever more important. The past was about origins, thus about culture, and this combined with migration that could not, in a stagnating industrial economy, lead to integration. The result was a search for meaningful roots, which led to ethnicization among both nationals and immigrants, and multiculturalism became an increasingly dominant ideology among political and related elites who no longer had class on their agenda. There is a logic in this transformation of part of the left that is important to consider here, one that I have described for Sweden that displays a number of similarities with the Netherlands. The top-down multicultural politics of the new centrist right-left combination links a number of elements. First, new political coalitions transcended – in Tony Blair’s and Anthony Giddens’s (2000) sense – the right-left divide. This is epitomized in the Third Way of New Labour but also of the Neue Mitte in Germany. Social democracy assimilated neo-liberal politics and redefined it as not only progressive, but also necessary.



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The dismantling of the welfare state, on this account, was necessary because of globalization, a force of nature, that implies increasing competition and therefore cuts in spending, but is understood as good and progressive. As Giddens puts it, “‘Radicalism’ cannot any longer be equated with ‘being on the left.’ On the contrary, it often means breaking with established leftist doctrines where they have lost their purchase on the world” (39). Now, of course, “radical” can be right as well as left, and its defin­ ition has never been that clear, but it has usually meant extreme, a movement away from accepted centrist doctrine. Giddens has, however, defined radical with a movement from social democracy to liberalism, that is, a radical centrism. Furthermore it is connected to the notion of la voie unique, namely, that there is only one way to govern, an approach that has been institutionalized in New Public Management, and which makes nonsense of popular democracy. The people, the demos, are, if anything, dangerous for real democracy (Burns et al. 2000) and can be replaced by a model in which the true actors are corporations, ethnic groups, government agencies, and experts. The concept of “the people” is returned to the notion of classes dangereuses from a previous era, an object of fear and of necessary resocialization. Multiculturalism is logically compatible if not necessary in this process of reconfiguration. The latter transforms “the people” into “the peoples,” and in the highly centralized state formations of Western Europe, it entails horizontal segregation as well as the encompassment of difference so that the state becomes a primus inter pares rather than representative of a single population. It also, in this way, disassociates the emergent political class from its constituency. In the Swedish case this has implied a cosmopolitanization of political identity including denial among members of the political class of national origins. A former minister of immigration replied, during an interview, when asked if he was Swedish, “No!” and gleefully recounted his genealogy, which had origins in Scotland, Germany, and Denmark. This raison généologique and an explicitly anti-national mentality has upstaged the older assumptions of national identity among elites. In a government act from 1998–99 the Swedish government redefines the country as a plural society that no longer has “a common history,” but it is not clear to what extent this has occurred in the Netherlands.

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The general tendency is, in any case, quite evident in both France and in Sweden. In France the upward distantiation of the already existent “political class” has been analyzed in a number of popular books with expressive titles such as La faute aux élites (Juillard 1997) and Le gouvernement invisible: Naissance d’une démocratie sans le peuple (Joffrin 2001) where the new political elite’s multicultural politics has been described as I have done for Sweden. Ruling sections of the left have shifted toward the right and class politics has become cultural politics. Second, the demographic composition of the Western nationstate has changed significantly with the massive increase in immigration, but it is not the demographic change that is crucial. Rather it is the way in which the identity of both immigrants and host populations is practised and the way such practices have been transformed. The fundamental change is not, then, quantitative but qualitative, consisting largely in the process of ethnicization or more generally in the intensification of cultural identification. The latter has led to a process of transnationalization of social, cultural, and economic relations within the migration process but also in the increasing fear, not least among downwardly mobile national populations, of the unknown and the foreign – which leads to increasing xenophobia. There is marginalization both among nationals and immigrants in this period, and this is expressed in the reconfiguration of urban space in which enclavization becomes generalized. Conflict necessarily increases in such situations, and to this we must add another geopolitical/geocultural development. The particular case of the growth of militant and at least oppositional Islam is that which has been most salient. The geopolitics of this situation combines the general enclavization process with a growing geopolitical representation of the world that pits the Islamic world against the Christian (and Jewish) West. The movement for the establishment of Islam in Europe and even, for some ideologues, the Islamization of Europe as reinforced oppositional identifications, has become more or less institutionalized after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 and the ensuing war on terror.2 In this process of polarization the generalized increase in existential insecurity combines with what is perceived as aggression, which is not a mere fantasy, and takes on the prototypical characteristics of occidentalists versus Islamophobes. To reduce this to one-sided racism is absurd. There have been no attacks on Buddhists, Hindus, or



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Orthodox Christians. But these religions do not form part of a world historical cosmology of such schismogenic scale. This in turn reinforces the process of enclavization that accompanies the usual effects of non-integration: exclusion and poverty, aggression and criminality. Many European countries find themselves in a critical situation with respect to just such a state of affairs. This is very different from the situation in the 1960s and early 1970s when immigrants were sought after, usually integrated, and often assimilated into their host countries. Many previous immigrants from this period are themselves very disturbed by the current situation and are often quite suspicious of the immigration policies that have dominated recent decades.

Pim Fortuyn In the Netherlands the new centrist governments are called “purple” as in red (left) + blue (right) and have divided the old left (old is not the real old left but the old new left from the 1960s and 1970s). Fortuyn was part of that left which became disaffected. He represented the dominant culture of the previous period that had combined a strong sense of popular sovereignty with cultural iconoclasm. This implied that homosexuality in its most flamboyant expression could be perfectly acceptable within the social field of Dutch society since it was part and parcel of Dutch liberation politics. It could not, however, accept the existence of other social projects imported from the outside, especially if they implied an arbitrary restriction on rights that had been won by struggles within Dutch society. In February of 2002, “A reporter asked him [Fortuyn] why he felt so strongly about Islam. ‘I have no desire,’ he replied, ‘to have to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again. There are many gay high school teachers who are afraid of revealing their identity because of Turkish and Moroccan boys in their classes. I find that scandalous” (cited in Buruma 2006: 57). This republican or national or sovereigntist left typifies the emergent ideologies that are the basis of support for figures like Fortuyn. His murder was not, then, a mere expression of the progressive rage at a right-wing racist or even Nazi as some called him. Thus, part of the left became what I call respectable, neo-liberal, and multicultural, while another part became sovereigntist and maintained the old socialist ideals as well as an assimilationist ideology.

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What is most interesting in this is that this position developed primarily in reaction to Islam rather than to immigration in general. The former became a symbol for resistance and even aggression to values considered central to Western democratic culture. And it became increasingly manifest following the attack on the World Trade Center. Fortuyn’s murder was not the work of a foreigner, but of an internal oppositional actor, one who identified with Nature and would go to extremes to protect it from a meat-eating, fur-wearing consumerist who was against the proliferation of Islam via immigration. What are the oppositions that characterize the intentionality of the vegan? In this case it might be an example of what Buruma and Margalit (2004) have called occidentalism, an occidentalism that associates Western values with evil and the decadence of the contemporary world and that opposes those values. Is there a logic to the overt statements by assassin Volkert van der Graaf that Fortuyn had to be killed not only because of his negative relation to Nature but because of his negative attitude to immigration? For van der Graaf, immigrants seem to be associated with Nature as well, as if those parts of the world from which immigrants come are the Other, the holistic, good Other and representatives of an alternative to the West. That Otherness is associated with a holistic relation to nature as well, a primitivism as an inversion of the modernist developmentalism of the West. These may be rather loose connections but they are similar to those that I have found in interviews with members of such groups: they reproduce racialist logic while being anti-racist. Fortuyn became an instant hero in the Netherlands. His funeral was a true spectacle, highlighting his own taste for luxury. His Daimler was in the cortege driven by his chauffeur, with Fortuyn’s two dogs. There was music and there were football songs, both of which expressed national and local football tribalism – and all of this for a flamboyant homosexual dandy. Social Democrat Ad Melkert, who attended the funeral, was accosted by a well-dressed elderly woman who screamed, “Now you’ve got what you want, you bastard” (Buruma 2006: 44). Not just a hero for many, but a virtual saint, a holy figure embodying a sovereign ideal of what was perceived as a world soon to be lost. Fortuyn was voted the most popular man in Dutch history, and a statue was erected in his name in



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Rotterdam with the motto “Loquendi libertatem custodiamus” (Let us safeguard the right to speak). This is the kind of reaction that liberals and those leftists who have appropriated liberal pluralism abhor. Buruma is cynical about the reaction and explicitly characterizes Fortuyn as a paradoxical figure: “Fortuyn was no Haider or Le Pen; he was something more interesting: a populist who played on the fear of Muslims while boasting of having sex with Moroccan boys; a reactionary who denounced Islam for being a danger to Dutch liberties; a social climber who saw himself as an outsider battling the elite … he was a peddler of nostalgia” (Buruma 2006: 47). This echos the interpretation of many self-identified liberal progressives, even though Buruma himself is ambivalent about the situation, and while against Fortuyn’s politics, he understands that there is a real political issue here rather than just plain populist trickery.

Van Gogh Theo Van Gogh, grand-nephew of the great artist, was brought up in the cultural elite, though certainly not rich. He was a member of the dissident left and famous for his provocative and even vulgarly provocative style. Not given to understatement, he appeared often on TV and had a newspaper column in which he attacked a great many things. He was accused of anti-Semitism, and renowned for a whole series of crude invectives against personalities in the Dutch culture scene. Much of this is accounted for by Buruma in terms of personality, but there is also a logic to this. Van Gogh became famous in the Netherlands by means of an invective that was very much aimed at what he saw as the hypocrisy that was prevalent in his own society. His language followed suit, littered with four-letter words and their spectacular elaboration. He immediately became interested in Fortuyn and the two became friends, the latter writing “one-liners” for Van Gogh’s media appearances. As a young man he had made a few extremely foul films but some very interesting works as well. He made a film about the assassination of Fortuyn in which a conspiracy of the US Secret Service, the extreme right, and American intervention play central roles. Van Gogh attacked everything and everyone. He cannot be reduced to a racist, not unless his racism is entirely generalized. He attacked

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all ethnic groups including his own, a true “equal opportunity racist.” He was primarily a champion of what he thought of as honesty, hard talk, and the abhorrence of hypocrisy in whatever form. His attraction to Ayaan Hirsi Ali (see below) stems from the manner in which her own critique of Islam was treated as dangerous and all too provocative by the political elite of the country. This of course led to his film together with her, Submission, which deals with the oppression of women in Islam, but it is also a direct attack on the prophet Mohammed. It is this “blasphemy” that provoked Van Gogh’s murder. But Van Gogh also helped a number of young Muslim actors and employed them in his films. In one televised drama about cross-ethnic love, he is clearly on the side of the Moroccan boy rather than the Dutch policeman who is the father of the girl or the Dutch boyfriend who causes the Moroccan boy to drown. These are cases in which the individuals break the rules represented by their parents, on both sides. As he said, “There are a hundred thousand decent Muslims, to whom we Dutch people ought to reach out” (Buruma 2006: 108). Van Gogh was one of the few Dutch directors to make films about the issues of immigration. He was decidedly politically incorrect on all fronts. This was his modus vivendi, and it was the cause of his death. Of course there were many liberals who accused him of causing his own death, that is, via his provocative style. He was clearly not a person who was afraid of “rocking the boat,” but he was apparently unaware of the price to be paid in the contemporary world of multicultural conflict. Hirsi Ali Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born in Somalia, was brought up as a devout Muslim in East Africa, went to Islamist schools, and was completely engaged in the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, of martyrdom, and of wearing the hijab as a teenager. But at the age of twenty-two, when she was to be married off to a cousin in Canada, she revolted against her fate and escaped to Europe. She admits openly that she lied about her Somali origins and her family, which later caused her serious problems, because she thought it would be easier to gain acceptance in Europe. She is an outspoken critic of Islam, not least with regard to the treatment of women, and she was involved, as stated above, in Van Gogh’s film Submission, for which she wrote the screenplay.



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The film is a frontal attack on the relation between Islam and gender dominance and its inherent violence. It was this film that apparently led to Van Gogh’s eventual death at the hands of Mohammed Bouyeri, a Moroccan Muslim who attacked and killed him as he was cycling to work. Bouyeri stabbed Van Gogh numerous times and planted a knife in his chest with a note of warning to Hirsi Ali. Bouyeri was the son of an immigrant who was a successful hard-working man who became handicapped in his long life of labour. Bouyeri was a bright boy, open-minded, and interested in becoming part of Dutch society, but a number of setbacks ruined his career in this respect. First, his club lost its meeting place due to urban renewal. He was involved in a brawl with police and subsequently turned down for a job at the airport. Finally, he was unsuccessful in his relationship with women, especially Dutch women, all of which incited increasing aggression. It has been noted by many that the makings of violent aggression to Western society are often the result of failure in projects of self-integration. This is probably as true for Westerners as for immigrants, but in the latter case the aggression can take on a cultural form that is clearly marked, as in the case of Islamism, a solution that is also open to Westerners as can be seen among the several terrorists of Western extraction.

The Cultural Logic of Two Assassinations There is a logical similarity in these two murders, one that can be understood in terms of the following scheme of opposed terms: West/non-West Decadence/Vitality Secular/Religious Lax(-authority)/Controlled(+authority) Civilization/Nature Now these terms can be found in both the statements of Bouyeri and of those who supported him in principle even if disagreeing with him in practice, as well as of van der Graaf, although here information from other vegans needs to be used to account for the categories he employed. In both cases there is a prominent occidentalist positioning. The West is seen to represent everything

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negative: decadence, secularism, laxity – all of which is associated with civilization as opposed to the natural holistic worlds of the Other. What is sometimes referred to as primitivism is an inversion of the signs of a former relation of dominance. In the modernist period the West was associated with vitality and control as well as with individual(ist) liberation. The dandy, sexuality, and female and homosexual liberation are part of this, all terms that refer to the individual subject as against the collectivity. Modernist liberation became the rallying point for the support of both Fortuyn and Van Gogh in a state dominated by an elite that had gone liberal-multiculturalist. Why should this pose a problem? After all liberalism and multiculturalism are excellent partners. But, of course, liberation is not liberalism. On the contrary, the radical left is quite opposed to liberalism as such. The split in the left occurred, as we have indicated, because a significant part of the left moved toward the liberal centre. I offer here a speculation on the changes involved in political culture that this situation helps to clarify.

Occidentalism and Ideological Inversion Since the end of the 1970s there has been an inversion of signs on a set of oppositions that can be said defines Western identity in most Western countries. The former dominant ideology or identity was one in which the West was the centre and the non-West the lowerranked periphery, in which the West had surpassed superstition and arrived at a scientifically dominated secular society, in which the truth was about the scientific search for truth in true modernist fashion. This has come to be reversed in a double sense. First, the economic and now the cultural hegemony of the West is in decline and challenged from new rising or contesting regions. The contestation is also part of the ideological inversion of modernism within the West itself. Some of this has been discussed in Friedman (2002, 2010) and in the recent Buruma and Margalit volume, Occidentalism (2004). It refers to the transformation of the representation of the progressive, one that Van Gogh and Fortuyn did their best to dismantle. Buruma (2006: 30) is acutely aware of the kind of ideological inversion for which we have argued:



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Table 8.1 The shifting content of progressive ideology 1968

1998

The national The local Collective Social(ist) Political intervention Homogeneous Monocultural Equality (sameness)

The postnational The global Individual Liberal Moral intervention Heterogeneous Multicultural Hierarchy (difference)

There is a long and frequently poisonous history in European politics of left-wing internationalism and conservative defence of traditional values. The Left was on the side of universalism, scientific socialism, and the like, while the Right believed in culture, in the sense of “our culture,” “our traditions.” During the multicultural age of the 1970s and 1980s, this debate began to shift. It was now the Left that stood for culture and tradition, especially “their” culture and tradition, that is, those of the immigrants, while the Right argued for the universal values of the Enlightenment. The problem in this debate was the fuzzy border between what was in fact universal and what was merely “ours.” The shift described in Table 8.1 is an expression of the ideological inversion of the representation of “the progressive” in the West, which is also encompassed in what one might call the shift from orientalism to occidentalism, a shift from a self-assured imperial centre to a weakened cultural authority, the target of both internal and external onslaughts. All of this is the true expression of a real hegemonic decline. This comparison of two different decades indicates the sudden shift in identification that is reflected in the case study provided by Buruma. It occurs within a single generation, although from interviews there are many younger people who identify with the progressive terms for 1998 listed in Figure 8.1 who are quite unaware of the previous ideology. For those who have undergone the shift themselves repression is a common solution, or even denial, but rarely

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Figure 8.1.  External meets internal occidentalism.

a more serious consideration of what has happened. An analysis of this set of oppositions throws further light on the Dutch situation. The 1960s and early 1970s were an era of “national liberation” applied to the Third World, to decolonization, and to the rights of Indigenous peoples, all fused in a millenarian project of liberation and local or national sovereignty. The post-national did not of course exist in this period. But there was instead internationalism, which meant primarily class alliance and for some, for example, Trotskyists, the formation of a world socialist order. There were debates, going back to the turn of the last century, regarding the socialist project, but the terms were indeed different and they were in any case based on a notion of people as the class, whether national or international. The core of the notion of national liberation concerned the issue of sovereignty, the control by a population of its conditions of existence. The post-national position is instead entirely negative to the national, heaping invective on the latter as the source of xenophobia, essentialism, racism, Nazism, and the like, and characterized in general by the metaphor of closure. The idea of the local follows from the same concept of sovereignty, but applied to the selfidentified community, whether a tribe or a political commune. It is rejected today in favour of the global which is no longer associated with encroachment and the world capitalist economy, but with openness and, therefore, progress. The collective is a mere summation of a set of terms also related to sovereignty, in which a common social project is the basic value. The shared quality of the goal creates the movement for change or revolution and the latter are



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understood as collective ventures. This is replaced by the centrality of the individual and a rejection of the collective as dangerous. This rejection is partly fuelled by the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet empire and the transition to individualist liberalism in the left – which gave the collective a bad name. This transition is characterized by the breakdown of working-class organization and by the increasing focus on individual fulfilment via consumption, whether of commodities, tradition, or religion. This is reflected in the shift from social to liberal and from political to moral representations of the world. It is also a shift from the creation of a new world to the struggle for particular human rights and humanist interventions. In the 1960s the homogeneous was simply a product of the ideology of sovereignty, of a common project. This was not an issue of the cloning of subjects but of shared goals. It is today conflated with essentialism and the homogeneous nation – which should and shall be replaced by diversity and heterogeneity. The monocultural follows from this, of course, but here refers only to political culture, since other forms of cultural specificity were unmarked (in terms of identity) in the 1960s. The politicization of culture in a situation of fragmentation and ethnicization generated the opposed term multiculturalism. Egalitarianism is also replaced in the wake of heterogenization, which is applied in cultural terms in a transition that moves from equality as sameness to equality as difference, and the latter can imply and certainly allows for hierarchy. In any case the erasure of class differentiation from the new emphasis on culture largely eliminated any concern with such matters. This shifting perspective on the world provides some content to the structural transformation that I am trying to grasp. It is one that contains another series that is explicitly discussed by Buruma and Margalit (2004), one in which the West is seen as the prototype of all the terms on the left-hand side of the set of oppositions shown in Table 8.1).

The Resurgence of the Other If orientalism, as we suggest above, can be understood as the ideo­ logical framework of Western domination, the decline of Western hegemony can be translated into a resurgence of Otherness. This is reflected in the emergence of Indigenous movements and the general ethnicization referred to above. The threat to the disaffected

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republican left is not the threat of other cultures themselves, but the threat of one’s own culture being contested by real Others as well as by the new liberal elites that have emerged from the former ranks of the progressive, the new cosmopolitans who are among the chief perpetrators of occidentalist perspectives. In the West itself this is the core of post-colonial discourse, of the critique of orientalism. Now Van Gogh was a vicious critic of his own society, but his criticism was not foundational and it was not cultural. On the contrary his critique, like that of the left of the 1960s, was directed toward the hypocrisy of politicians, to smug bourgeois notions of political correctness, and of a particular status quo. This was critique from the inside, based on the values and ideals of the same culture that was used to target the failure of those values in actual practice. The new occidentalist critique, however, was total, summed up in the famous Stanford University chant, “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Western culture’s got to go!” Occidentalism refers to the latter phenomenon, of course, but it is also one that is represented in the Islamicist onslaught and that is crucial in understanding why it is just here that the conflict has been strongest. It is strangely essentialist when we consider that it comes from a post-colonial discourse that sees essentialism as the major problem of Western orientalism, but that nevertheless engages itself in the essentialization of the West. The two murders discussed here are, in this sense, examples of internal and external occidentalism, the first, the vegan-ecological rage against modern capitalist society, and the second, the rage against secular modernism and the West as its chief imperial representative.This accounts for the overlap in the positions of Bouyeri and Van der Graaf. The overlap lies in the occidentalist identification with the Other. That “Other” could be the primitive/traditional counterpart to civilization as it appeared within orientalist discourse but with the signs reversed. The two sets are, of course, inconsistent, but for the occidentalist there are always ways to explain apparent inconsistencies in positive terms. Thus, strength, authority, and religion as categories are reconfigured as part of a holistic vision that contains that which is sorely lacking in the West. Decadence enters as the expression of consumerist desire without self-control and without consideration for the environment. As the West is defined as a negative term, only the West can be dominant and imperialist. And the core of the problem is the nation-state itself, the generator of essentialist



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evil. Thus, a great effort is made to depict the Ottoman Empire (Mills 2008, 2010; Mayaram 2008, Borovali 1998) as progressive in its millet system of multiculturalism by insisting on the intrinsically non-Western character of such a social arrangement. Multiculturalism belongs to the Other in this inversion of signs. The above pattern depicts a broad transformational process, transformational in the structuralist sense because it involves the reversal of signs among relations whose underlying properties are invariant. The equation at the end contains the statements made by the two murderers, one an internal occidentalist and the other an external occidentalist. The coincidence of these oppositional positions is the conjunctural expression of declining global hegemony. This is not, of course, the entire story but it does reveal a set of parameters that are also evident in the following cases. The Van Gogh/Fortuyn story is the story of the disaffected left in the most concrete sense. But it is a specific left, characterized by what can be called sovereigntism, the will to power over one’s collective conditions of existence. This is the sovereignty associated with the French Revolution, that which makes it a nationalist (in the most generic sense) movement, one that makes “all power to the people” the core of the ideology of direct democracy in which governance is the extension of the will of the people, where there is no mediating term such as a representative corps of legislators, or at least where the latter are mere extensions of popular sovereignty, meaning here majority sovereignty. All oppositions harbour ambivalence and the above are no exceptions. One might criticize Fortuyn for being a nationalist at the same time as he sported a cosmopolitan elite lifestyle, but oppositions are always relative, and in this case the national for Fortuyn was about his own perspective on the West – which he associated with the liberal gains that made his own homosexual existence more bearable. His opposition to Islam was about his own liberty and a world that enabled him to gain the latter. Both Fortuyn and Van Gogh represent a radical modernist position that entails continuous critique in a way that is prototypical for Western modernism. In this sense there is no break with the modern but rather its intensification. This can be said to be shared by classical revolutionary movements and their avant-gardes, all part of a specific and waning tradition of history making.

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The configuration is not specific to the Netherlands although it expresses a specific historical conjuncture. The republican left is an established voice in France as well as in the Netherlands, but it hardly exists in England or in Scandinavia as a collective phenomenon. There is a small but growing political party in Sweden, the Swedish Democrats, that might be said to represent the same kind of political position, just as the much larger Danish People’s Party. For the former, many of the members are former socialists and even communists, as in the case of the Front National in France. Individual voices certainly exist in all countries of Europe, but it is especially in the Netherlands and France that they exist as collective expressions. In terms of shifting politics one might describe a more general logic or invariant, which can be manifested in a number of different forms or combinations depending on specific cultural/historical conditions. It should be noted, however, that what is invariant here is an invariant logic of change rather than a static form. The classical left (socialist and social democratic) and right have tended to merge in terms of practical politics. This merger is expressed in a series of terms using the adjective “new”: new democrats, new labour, even new conservatives (who are moderates in Sweden), and especially neue Mitte in Germany where its spatial character captures the reordering of the political arena. The doctrine involved in this is contained in the various documents and publications concerning the Third Way, also expressive of a new centralism. The new centralization of politics is cemented by New Public Management (NPM) ideology in which a single praxeology of governance is meant to replace the “ideological” principles of the past and it is enunciated from both left and right: la voie unique from the socialists in France to den enda vägen from the Swedish right. Politics is reduced to management in this way, just as class issues are stricken from the political agenda as a basis of organization. The above process becomes intimately articulated with the shift from class to culture that began somewhat earlier in the 1980s. The decline of modernism, the decline of Fordism, the emergence of flexible accumulation, flexible labour, and the economic crisis of the state and its consequent outsourcing spelled the end of an era of the centralized state social project dominated by modernist assimilation as well as welfare, which on the left was the socialist or at least social democratic project itself and on the right the liberal



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modernist project in which homogeneity was crucial for the notion that the state was an instrument of “the people.” The decline of the modernist project, very much related to the declining hegemony of the West, led to a series of re-identifications based on the only thing that could be said to be fixed in a chaotic world, cultural identity. The latter, of course, is not fixed in objective terms, but it is experienced as fixed. Cultural identity of this sort, chosen or reborn in a period of crisis can be described as achieved ascription. Thus, roots, ethnicity, religion, and gender all increase in political importance. As this is accompanied by real disorder and increasing displacement of populations, it also imprints itself on the migration wave of the 1980s. It is not, of course, migration that leads to the growing issue of immigrant culture and identity. Rather it is the increasing focus on identity itself in this period of declining modernism. The previous period in Europe was characterized by large-scale labour migration as well, but in that period of economic expansion ethnicity was not a major issue since it was still dominated by modernist ideology. In those “old days,” class solidarity played a more important role than ethnicity (Touraine 1978, 1979; Wieviorka 1996; Wieviorka and Ohana 2001). The involvement of the political establishment in all of this is crucial for understanding the way in which the contemporary situation came to be structured. The decline of modernism had a major effect on the political elites. The loss of political ideology on the left and the economic transformation in the West that undermined class politics linked these elites to the general process of increasing cultural and identity politics which became their own agenda in this period. As immigration became a cultural issue that wouldn’t go away, multiculturalism became a possible program. And as governance became increasingly distanced from popular opinion, the politics of culture became a new source of state activity. Top-down multiculturalism became a new agenda for both liberals and the left – which was already becoming liberal – as submitted by Juillard (1997: 105): Aux ouvriers elles ont substitué les immigrés et ont reporté sur ceux-ci le double sentiment de crainte et de compassion qu’inspire généralement le prolétaire. Or l’immigré n’est pas seulement victime de l’exclusion sociale, mais aussi de l’exclusion ethnique, autrement dit du racisme.

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(They have substituted immigrants for the working class and have invested the former with the double emotion of fear and compassion that formerly inspired the relation to the proletariat. However, the immigrant is not only a victim of social exclusion but also of ethnic exclusion, in other words, racism.) The substitution of immigrant for worker spelled a shift from the “sociological” left to the “moral” left. This is not a mere question of changing strategies but an important structural transformation, or even an articulation of transformations. Suddenly politics was about racism rather than class inequality. And the discourse on multiculturalism that dominated the transition was the celebration of difference as a factor of social enrichment. The identification of political elites as cosmopolitan is also part of this process since it provided the perspective needed to look down on the world, so to speak, and marvel in the jumble of exotica to be found in the global concentration of differences. In some cases, as that of Sweden, the ideology became an issue of the necessity of importing difference, which turned out to be ideologically and economically advantageous as well as a source of cultural enrichment, as described by Westin (2000: 734): “Diversity is linked with immigration. If immigration is stopped, diversity is jeopardized. Policy-makers should reassess immigration policy. Diversity should not be seen as a means to handle what is perceived as ‘problematic immigration.’ Rather, immigration needs to be seen as the positive means to achieve the goal of diversity. All Western countries have ageing populations. If welfare systems are to be maintained immigration of labor power will soon become an economic demographic necessity.”3 The parallels between such statements and the crasser statement to be found in the colonial pluralism of the past are quite striking. Moreover, as in the colonial era, diversity was a critical ingredient in governance in which the relation between rulers and ruled was not bound to political representation. That is, in colonial regimes there are no citizens, only subjects. As rulers are lifted into a higher sphere of governance they escape the demands of accountability of those governed. The diversification of the population accelerates the transformation of “the people” into peoples, the state becoming increasingly absolute in its functioning. In this process the national population can be reduced to just another ethnic group.



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The contemporary issues of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism are all generated as political concerns from this complex of changes. To characterize this development, we might say that it consists in a movement from the nation-state to a plural society. If this were combined with the movement toward a new, less democratic, centralized state, then the future Western polity might return to some form of absolutism, or even to an internal colonialism, which is one possible outcome of absolute rule. Absolutist states were, we note, supremely pluralist, not least insofar as they had no “people” to deal with, only “peoples” – who were subjects rather than citizens (Friedman 2010). The classical left has split along the issues of the common project and its relation to shared values into a liberal (and even neoliberal) dominant wing and a traditional sovereigntist/republican wing. The latter is classified as backward-looking and even reactionary by the former. This is a general split in all of its variations. In Europe it is a split between dominant social democratic elites and what is often the marginalized left within the party or even outside of the party. Republican tendencies in France have connected former left and right elements under the banner of the republic and the nation. In France these are powerful tendencies that cannot be easily dismissed. In Sweden such tendencies are seen by the dominant liberal elites as reactionary, racist, and anti-democratic. Traces of the same split can be found in the intellectual left in the United States, where former leftists such as Todd Gitlin (1995) and Eric Jacoby (1994) were often recategorized as reactionary on the grounds that they represent a republican/national ideal.4 In politics the shift to the centre is expressed in the entry of large numbers of former leftists into the ranks of the Democratic Party and the growth of multicultural politics not least in the university world, which became the locus of a new discourse of post-colonial hybridity, while on the street ethnic politics reigned supreme. The labile variable here is the degree to which the ruling new liberal elites have been able to contain the republican renegades by redefining the political arena. This ability depends on the specific political culture of the country. In Sweden, for example, the shift to multicultural from class politics has occurred without a republican split because tendencies in that direction have been successfully contained by labelling them as racist, fascist, and even Nazi in

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conditions of ideological hegemony. Thus, the republican left has been labelled as right and race has become the definitive factor in differentiating left and right. Such hegemony has not been possible in most other countries. The Netherlands is an example of the more usual situation of contestation in which the state is liberal and multicultural. France is another example of this situation of contestation in which the state is republican. The United Kingdom has some similarities to Sweden, but the state has recently backed down on multiculturalism after several decades of pluralist politics. On the other hand, the structure of the political space of the United Kingdom is quite special with an imperial level in which there are subjects of the crown and a national level that is characterized by national citizenship. It might be suggested that it is the imperial imaginary that makes the recourse to cultural pluralism an attractive possibility in the United Kingdom. In this process the elites have seen themselves becoming increasingly estranged from their national constituencies, as welfare has been outsourced and downsized at the same time as their own privileges have significantly increased. They tend to look upward and outward and identify increasingly beyond the nation-state and into the cosmo-sphere, the arena of a global elite community. This latter encompasses liberalism and sometimes neo-liberalism, occidentalism, multiculturalism, and some form of hybridity, understood as the fusion of difference, as in fusion cooking which also appears in this period. In a number of countries this process is accompanied by a shift of lower-class voters from the left to what are called right-wing nationalist parties. This is the phenomenon of “lemon nationalism,” among the downwardly mobile members of the working class. The support for such parties on the part of this segment of the national population is well documented and it is related to the decline of the industrial sector in the West and the resultant downward mobility of the increasingly under- or unemployed members of this sector.

Structure and the Logic of Transformation If we consider these processes, we can suggest a trajectory that might account for the transitions involved. The splitting of the left occurs in most European countries, but it is most strongly manifested in



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the Netherlands and France, whereas in other countries it has been suppressed by the new liberal-left actors themselves. These differences are, as we have said, variations on common themes rather than totally separate and unrelated cases. They are united by a combination of invariant tendencies in the vertical space of the nation-state and historical particularities in the states themselves. The general process is one in which the left splits into two, the liberal sector moving toward the liberal right in a consolidation of a new centrism while the other part of the left (old left?) moves increasingly toward a localist/sovereigntist position that merges in some respects with the new right nationalism. The left-right centralist fusion generates a process of political marginalization of those sectors of both right and left that refuse the move toward the centre. Furthermore, the centre is also cosmopolitan and even post-national, and it very often harbours a strong anti-nationalist self-identity. These new quasi-coalitions create a new division, but this is unlike the former left/right division because it is decidedly hierarchical. As class politics declines, moral politics rises to dominance. Political discourses are about the good, about good governance, transparency, human rights, openness, tolerance, and even about an embrace (at a distance to be sure) of the Other who is now among us as a product of mass immigration. It is also about culture and respect for culture, not all culture but the culture of others defined as the victims of colonialism. This representation is shared by immigrant actors as well as their cosmopolitan allies. The degree to which it is formulated by the former depends on the articulateness of the population in question, a variable that is linked to education and social class. The French movement, Les indigènes de la république (http://www.indigenes-republique.fr/) is an example of the inversion of signs discussed here. The participants in the movement represent themselves as colonial subjects within the heart of the French state, and they demand the inversion of values that would enable them to achieve their freedom from dominance. In Sweden a similar interpretation has developed, but here it is in a group of researchers hired by the state to investigate discrimination (Kamali 2006). They argue that Sweden is structurally racist because of the dominance of Swedish culture, a particular mode of interpreting the world, of acting and teaching, which excludes the foreigner, one that is implicit in all spheres of life, from school to government. The solution to this problem is the elimination of the hegemony

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of Swedish culture in Sweden. The difference between the French and Swedish situations is that while in France “les indigènes” are an outsider group, in Sweden they are representatives of the state. The authors of the report (above)were seen to be so lacking intellectually that they actually caused quite a bit of critical discussion without changing the framework of interpretation from which the report arose. These differences are differences in particular configurations and not in kind. Beneath it all is a basic set of relations that remain constant. The mechanisms of the transformation can be likened to the kind of process discussed by Lévi-Strauss in his “Do Dual Organizations Exist” (1958) in which he delineates the relations between what he calls diametric and concentric dualism and for which he constructed some elaborate models. I suggest here that this is applicable to the reconfiguration of political culture in contemporary Western European nation-states. The political core of concentric dualism is the diarchy discussed by Marshall Sahlins in numerous works since his essay on the “stranger-king” (1985a: 73–93). The language of the cosmopolitanism to which we have referred is clearly akin to Sahlins’s model of foreign rule internalized. It is not exactly the xenophobia of Sparta versus the cosmopolitanism of Athens, although there are interesting zones of overlap. Consider the cosmopolitan Athens with its population of 80 per cent slaves and 20 per cent free and democratic citizens, and the various categories of foreigners, who were categorized as external to Athenian society. Slavery was, of course, directly linked to the Athenian international trade system. Sparta, more self-isolated, had a system of socialist helotry instead based on a striving after self-sufficiency. Is this not similar to the internal divisions of European societies today? In structural terms we might argue for a three-part division: upper classes and certain elites that identify upwards and outwards, working classes in decline that identify inwards, and immigrant lower classes who also identify outward but in a diasporic rather than cosmopolitan way. The latter populations have always existed but have historically been “unmarked,” integrated in a more forceful way into the social order as dependent labour. Of course, in the absence of a nationstate there is no clear “internal” or local population. But even here, as Jean-François Dubost and Peter Sahlins (1999) have shown, there are strong ethnic-territorial identities. So the



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logical order of states might be argued to include the foreign as a hierarchical position of worldly dominance over the local as a structure of the longue durée, a structure that has informed the contemporary cosmopolitan transformation of contemporary political elites. If diametric dualism is based on absolute reciprocity between two moieties that are equal to one another even if there is a certain division of symbolic function among them, concentric dualism is implicitly hierarchical, one side being the inside and the other the outside. The relation between the two is analyzed as a structural transformation that can go in either direction. Lévi-Strauss’s argument is that diametric dualism is not autonomous but a particular expression of concentric dualism – which is the foundational structure. The fact that complementarity implies the possibility of differentiation is the basis of much of his argument, and he provides empirical examples where apparent diametrical dualism contains third terms that imply the possibility of a concentric relation. This is also the ambivalence of the stranger-king or chief who is “domesticated” by the indigenous chief-priest in a ritual in which the former is “sacrificed” and brought back to life, a clearly widespread phenomenon that is well documented for Central Africa by Ekholm-Friedman (1977, 1984). The left/right opposition that has characterized Western European nation-states since the nineteenth century was based on classrelated politics, red versus blue. There are third terms in this pattern that have taken the form of social liberalism, and democratic welfare statism, but the left/right opposition is labile and can be reinvoked at any point in time to rearrange the terms. Thus, social democracy, once a compromise between socialism and the capitalist system, moved from centre to left in more recent decades and is today conflated with official socialism. Welfare state politics can be characterized as liberal, as in the United States, or socialist as in Europe, but then in the recent rise of neo-conservatism, the liberal has often been shifted into the category of socialist (as on Fox News and in the political rhetoric of the US Republican Party). In all of this there is another dimension, that of class, of elite status, and of the respectability of elite status. This hierarchy is repressed in the left/right division since it exists equally on both sides of the divide, and the divide is about the kind of social order to be constructed in the future. Several leaders of Communist parties in Western Europe have been millionaires but this has not been remarked upon in political representations (see Figures 8.2 and 8.3).

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Figure 8.2.  Components of the concentric shift in political culture.

Figure 8.3.  Diametric to concentric dualism.

The transition from the diametrical to the concentric is a complex process in which a number of factors are involved. First, there is the general decline of modernist class politics and the decline of major social projects. This has left the socialist camp without a vision or a project. With the fading of the latter, other identities have gained in prominence and the latter are necessarily of a cultural (in emic terms) character: ethnicity, roots, gender, and territory being among the most salient. This process included an upward mobility on the part of the left best characterized as adherents of the Third Way. The latter became the new centrally positioned elite along with the liberals from several right parties that have made the same (if shorter) transition. Those “left behind,” characterized by the new elites as reactionary, nationalist, and/or racist are from both the left and



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the right and adherents of a position that can best be characterized as sovereigntist. The above graphics highlight certain aspects of the transformation of the right/left division which was formerly more homogeneous at least in terms of representation. In the 1980s and 1990s there was a shift of the left toward the centre just as the liberal right also came to occupy an increasingly centrist position. This shift is a powerful one that is still ongoing today. In France the liberal François Bayrou formed a new party called “le mouvement démocrate” (http://www.mouvementdemocrate.fr/bayrou.html) that aims at a middle of the road liberal position and that has attracted members of both the socialist and liberal blocks. In Italy the Christian Democrats and parts of the left have also fused in a new Democratic coalition. Prodi’s Partito Democratico is a combination of left Christian Democrats and former Communists who today constitute the Democratici di sinistra (http://www.dsonline.it/). Some of the combinations are strange indeed, but they represent an interesting and important tendency toward a centralism. Moreover, the central position is identified as fundamentally practical, la voie unique that can come from either left or right. The new centre represents itself as respectable and responsible and, by definition, the embodiment of democracy. This becomes the new inner circle, whereas the outer circle represents the irresponsible and therefore undemocratic leftovers of a previous era of left/right opposition based on class and universalist social projects. Thus, the new centre is identified with progress, whereas the outer circle represents reaction. In numerous accounts of current conflicts this frame of categorization operates more or less as taken for granted, as doxa. The analysis provided here contrasts with that usually provided by contemporary progressives. Pieterse (2007), in a recent work on global multiculturalism, discusses the conflicts in Denmark, the Netherlands (his home country), and France. In each case he refers to the economic situation; the economic decline of the welfare state, downward mobility, and mass immigration. Here we agree totally, but where he differs is in viewing the rise of the extreme right as a product of populist manipulation by the new extremist political faction. Furthermore, in his analysis “right” means racist and “left” means multicultural, which is, in both historical and contemporary terms, not merely incorrect but totally misleading. My own point

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of departure is the declining hegemony that leads to the economic conditions highlighted, but unaccounted for, by Pieterse. If we merely penetrate beneath the surface of the language we find, as I have argued, that the left is just as much implicated in this change as is the right. The populism, once a word used to describe a certain anti-capitalist and anti-statist left (farmers and workers together), has changed its meaning, and that in itself is significant enough to warrant a deeper analysis than is forthcoming here. It is, in fact, the colonial regimes of Europe and then the liberal right who were the champions of multiculturalism, while the left for most of the past century was strategically monocultural. The left only became multicultural when it shifted to a more liberal and centrist position, and, as I argue, this accounts only for a portion of the left, not least certain elites, the upwardly mobile sector of the left. As we have suggested, the multicultural is a product of the distancing from local or national populations experienced by the new elites; it should not be surprising that multiculturalism is racialized in this perspective. Thus, Pieterse’s account of multiculturalism is entirely demographic and technological, in that it assumes that the movement of people is identical to the movement of culture, so that the co-mingling of people of different origins is also a co-mingling of cultures, enabled and reinforced by the Internet and easy travel to maintain relations to places of origins. It is interesting that such an essentialized view of culture can be maintained in this globalizing and selfidentified anti-essentialist approach. People do not bear cultures within themselves and, then, as in the old days of industrial migration, are forced to give them up. The maintenance or not of cultural repertoires depends on the social practices involved and the changing contexts in which they are located. That is why a large number of people, even today, assimilate or are at least integrated into their host cultures, depending often on class and other economic factors, but still as an intentional process. Demography cannot in itself be an accurate indicator of identity. The position adopted by Pieterse is, however, that, in varying degrees, of the dominant political and cultural elites. That such elites are progressive, in Giddens’s sense, is a translation of the fact that they have adapted to what they themselves call globalization, a globalization that requires downsizing, outsourcing, and networking, not progress in this approach but a symptom of decline itself.



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The entire issue of migration is inverted into a natural effect of globalization itself in the sense (Appadurai 1996, 2006: Hardt and Negri 2000) that we are all on the move nowadays, perhaps because it has been technologically facilitated, and all of this is part of a universal progress from sedentarism to nomadism. This is an integral aspect of an evolutionist vision, one that suppresses the enormous contradictions in the world system that have led to declining possibilities of survival in large parts of the Third World. Pieterse’s argument reduces to a combination of Jihad-and-McWorld and negative economic trends, and the Jihad in this case is represented by the nationalist right: no matter what the reason, economic or other, there are bad guys and good guys, and the bad guys are the localists, sovereignists, nationalists, etc., while the good guys are the multiculturalists and by extension those who are on the move, no matter why and what their motivation. Another set of oppositions characterize this shift which is very much part of those we have discussed above: Politics Morality

Class Race/Culture

Anti-state Pro-state

Organic intellectuals State intellectuals

These oppositions are characteristic of the situation in Europe as is much of the argument of this essay. It would be hopeless at this point to try and include the situation in countries such as the United States, but there are interesting parallels even if they represent different variations on the themes. We might suggest that if we look at the Republican and Democratic parties over the past decades there is also an interesting double set of oppositions beneath the official left/right opposition. Just as in Europe, we might find a transversal categorization that includes liberal republicans, who represent the Eastern establishment and their counterparts in the Democratic Party, from the eras of Roosevelt, Harriman, and later the Kennedys. The latter can be identified with the transatlantic alliance of financial capital that was the core of global organizations, from the Bilderberg to the World Economic Forum and the Trilateral Commission. This is clearly expressed in the close relation between both the Democratic (and Republican) Party and the dominant investment banks that were so involved in the crash of 2008 and in the way members of such banks were involved in the government bailout of the financial sector.

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Here there are the powerful capitalist elites whose interest is in maintaining a system by making compromises, even social democratic compromises where necessary. Opposed to this are a variety of oppositions. First, strange as it might seem, is the recent Republican Christian right (Buchanan 1999), but also large parts of the Democratic South and similar tendencies throughout the country that represent an older populist and working-class political culture, including, as we have suggested, both what are called left and right tendencies. What is specific to the United States is the partial victory of the latter, but similar tendencies can be found in Italy and France and to a lesser degree Germany. If we accept that there are similarities in the political tendencies, even if combined in different configurations, then the recent Republican victories can be understood as a specific conjuncture within the Western sector of the larger global order. It is not our purpose to provide an analysis of these tendencies, but I would suggest that they are part of the same fundamental scheme. It is noteworthy that the Occupy Wall Street Movement and its parallels in Europe has a mixture of Leninist, anarchist, and “extreme” right memberships, including the Tea Party in the United States. And they are opposed to the fusion of centre-left and right in what commentators have referred to as “purple” governance just as in the Netherlands, discussed earlier. This is also evident in the contemporary electoral process. There is a strong political continuity between the Clinton and the Bush administrations. The major difference is the historical shift from financial bubble to real decline. If the Democratic Party sees itself as a party of peace and of redistribution in the current elections, it should not be forgotten that they have very recently stood for the dismantling of whatever welfare institutions did exist, and for their more than fair share of imperial warfare around the world. Intellectuals in all of this are located very much inside of the institutional political order. The former left, which was extra-parliamentarian, is today incorporated into standard party politics. In Europe the decline of radical politics has led to the regrouping of intellectuals into the parties, not least of left intellectuals into standard social democratic institutions. Moreover, as intellectuals produce much of the discourse surrounding these changes, it should not seem unusual that their representations and texts occupy an important place in the contemporary political imaginary.



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Conclusion This discussion has been an experiment in the application of structuralist analysis to contemporary political culture, understood as a set of ordered representations. Lévi-Strauss himself suggested that the analysis of myths could be applicable to the study of political culture in the contemporary world, arguing: “The ‘thought-of’ orders are those of myth and religion. The question may be raised whether, in our own society, political ideology does not belong to the same category” (1958: 300). A major thrust of the work of Marshall Sahlins has been the exploration of the cultural properties of the political which Lévi-Strauss never himself achieved. We have tried to follow this suggestion and feel that it does reveal a great deal concerning the nature of the political process in the modern Western state and in the nature of the constitution of the state order. It also reveals that no understanding of the transformation of the state can be made without placing it within the larger field of ideology understood as the imagined nature of the world in the broadest sense. It questions the absolute dichotomy between left and right and attempts to account for the disappearance of both into the respectable centralist position of practical rule. This movement of diametric to concentric dualism is the central theme of this essay, and it might be suggested that cosmological shifts of this type are not uncommon in history. Our analysis is also meant to be able to account for the violent events in the Netherlands accompanying the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh that have led to yet further confrontations. The formation of a political pale of critics of the status quo who are declassified (déclassé) (Bourdieu 1978) or even demoted as a dangerous class is part of this kind of development. They themselves constitute the outer circle of non- respectful and not respectable troublemakers who were once included within the political spectrum as traditional socialists. These transformations, which have occurred with great rapidity, are evidence for the combinatorial nature of political ideological change in which there are invariant representational structures as well as numerous variants, the latter the product of particular historical conjunctures that are themselves generated by global systemic processes. The political world is a world saturated by strategic choices, but the choices would, if the current

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approach works, be strongly channelled into larger transformative processes that leave less room for alternatives than might appear. The cunning of History is precisely the outcome of a world in which we may know exactly what we are doing, but know little of what we are doing actually does. The only way to arrive at a clearer understanding is to engage in the kind of theoretical activity that Marshall Sahlins has made his hallmark, amplifying in uncharted ways the insights that are structuralist in nature but perhaps more general than that. Marx, for one, understood that “all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things coincided” (1971: 817).

Notes 1 Interviews with individuals representing diverse positions, from Anti-Fascist Action to Swedish Democrats were undertaken in the 1990s and early 2000s, a project financed by the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation. 2 See the debates surrounding Tariq Ramadan and Euro-Islam and the critical work of Bassem Tibi on Islamic colonization (2001, 2002, 2008). These are issues that do not exist because of inherent characteristics of one or another culture but because of a particular historical conjuncture. 3 This is common fare in EU political discourses as well, but they do not square with the levels of unemployment in the host countries in question, with the massive elimination of jobs due to technological change and the export of capital other parts of the world. 4 Republican here in the European meaning. It has nothing to do with the Republican Party in the United States.

9 Way-Finding: Respectfulness as a Performance Art Greg Dening

“Way-finding” is the term that modern islanders use to describe their craft and the craft of their ancestors in piloting their voyaging canoes around the Great Ocean, the Pacific, and the Sea of Islands. They prefer to call themselves way-finders rather than navigators. Navigation is a more universal science of instruments and the application of systems of time and space as broad as the cosmos itself. Way-finding is a more interpretive craft closer to the signs the systems of the cosmos imprint on the environment. No navigators would distance themselves from the myriad of signs in sea and sky, wind and water, that tell them where they are. Navigators, however, have the security that the system they are applying in their voyaging has a life outside them – in a book, an instrument, a map. For wayfinders no knowledge, no image is stilled either in time or in space. The temperature of the water, the movement of the waves, the seasons of the stars, the patterns of the winds, and the habits of the birds are all in their heads. And it is a knowledge that comes to them not through their own experience alone. It comes to them down through the ages of their line of masters and apprentices. Way-finders finds their way with style, as surfboarders ride their waves with style. No voyage is ever the same. Their way is always different, but always ruled by their confidence that they will find it (Kyselka 1987, Hau‘ofa 1993, Jolly 2007). I prefer, I must confess, to be a way-finder rather than a navigator in all my voyaging through learning and knowledge. Metaphors are the trade winds of the mind. Models are the doldrums.

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I first met Marshall Sahlins in print sixty years ago, in 1956. I read his “Esoteric Efflorescence in Easter Island” (1955). I remember being startled by it and perhaps feeling a little youthful jealousy of it. What startled me (I still have my notes on it) is that I read the article in the old reading room of the Victorian Public Library in Melbourne, with its dome almost as large as that of the British Library. Just seeing my notes makes me nostalgic for the magical hours I spent there. What startled me about the piece was Sahlins’s ability to read all that I was reading with different eyes. I identified those eyes at the time as “anthropological.” I thought of it as an ability to see quite particular and unique events as larger than themselves and to see them in the context of a rich “discourse” or “paradigm,” although to describe it with those words is now anachronistic. Sahlins was, at the time, like me, meeting his “Natives” in the library. He would have completed, if I have my dating correct, his doctorate at Columbia University at an extraordinarily young age – twenty-four years – in 1954. The book, Social Stratification in Polynesia (1958), that came out of his dissertation would have been in draft before he went to Fiji that year with his young wife, Barbara Vollen. Moala (Sahlins 1962a) was the ethnography that came out of that field trip. Library reading and observation has been the other long-lasting marriage in Sahlins’s life. That marriage has made him both a passionate traditionalist and a revolutionary thinker, perhaps a perfect example of that “specific evolution” of which he was a creative advocate in Evolution and Culture (1960a). Back in 1956, trying to see my “Natives” through the eyes of innumerable strangers, I was passionately historical and a little anti-anthropological. That was because British anthropology (the context of our colonial intellectual experience in Australia) was largely anti-historical, and American anthropology, as we experienced it in the Pacific, was unhistorical. Edward Tylor and Bronisław Malinowski, the architects of the British tradition, were anti-historical largely because they were fighting for a distinctive role for anthropology as a discipline against the dominant historical paradigm. The Americans were unhistorical in the Pacific because they were in “retrieval mode.” They could not bear to observe both the “disappearing” Pacific cultures and the coca-cola bottles littering the islanders’ beaches. We did not know what to call what we did in those days. It was certainly not “real history,” we were told in no uncertain terms. “Real history” was British history, the Renaissance, medieval history. “Natives”



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were unfashionable and infra dig. They still are in some circles. (I notice Lord Beloff recently sounding off about the need for writing the “real history” of empires – and by those at the centre of empire not at the margins.) I was one of the prize students at Melbourne University. My professor, when I told him I was going to Harvard to do anthropology the better to write the peculiar sort of history that I was interested in, said to me, “Dening, this is the end of your academic career.” We called what we did various names: “ethnohistory” for a time, then “culture contact,” “zero-point history.” However, each of those names was unsatisfactory. Ethnohistory seemed to suggest that we did history of the “civilized” and anthropology of the “Natives,” but we wanted to do history and anthropology, anthrohistory if you like, of the island peoples and the intruding strangers. “Cultures” don’t come in “contact.” “Culture contact” was a modelmaker’s concept, developed, if not born, in that most unhistorical resource, the Human Relations Area File. “Zero points” were supposedly those moments of the immediate Time-Before the encounters: there is denigration in that of all that came after. Supposedly, the zero point was the moment of true culture. But it is of the essence of cultures to be modern, to respond to a changing historical environment. Zero point denied creative Aboriginality. In Australia, at least, this has led to the denial of the essential modernity of Aboriginal culture and its depiction as a grotesque mimicry of the “civilized” (Dening 1966, 2001b). Whatever we called this two-sided history, inevitably there were large epistemological issues. The one was that both sides were changed forever by the encounter. Both sides were bound together by the encounter. Those of neither side ever after could see themselves or claim identity without the other. Those on both sides in discovering other possibilities inevitably enlarged their perceptions of themselves metaphorically. Those on both sides inevitably used the other to mirror themselves. The historian writing this changed and changing cultural environment bedevils two hundred years later. An historian does not observe the past. An historian only observes the texts by which the past has been ordered and given meaning. So discussing what “Natives” thought is only done through texts that changed that thinking by transforming it into a Euro-American form of writing and printing. Moreover, when the texts are not of “Natives” thinking but of Euro-Americans reporting what they thought “Natives” were thinking, the distance between the observer and the observed becomes even greater.

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The other epistemological issue was to become political very soon. When there is an event in encounters between peoples of different cultural perceptions, when the one event is actually perceived in totally different ways, from what perspective does one write a history of it? The event has two histories – well, many histories, but let’s focus on the distinct cultural histories. The overall history that is the historian’s is inevitably addressed to an understanding of something that never happened, a blending of the whole into some meaning that the parts never had, never could have. My solution (without argument here as to its propriety) was to play the historian and the anthropologist to both sides of the encounter and then, as well, to myself, the observer-historian. The epistemological issues were politicized in 1961 when Frantz Fanon published his Wretched of the Earth (see Fanon 1965). I don’t remember reading it before 1964. In a world of victims, Fanon wrote, there are no innocents. No one can write two-sided history who in some way benefits by the power of victors. No one can mediate between the disempowered living and the voiceless dead. Fanon shook me, I must confess, and made me wonder what was my place in the history I was writing and teaching. If I have resolved for myself through the years what that place is, it is because I feel that in a history so terrible as that of the Pacific, giving the dead a voice is reason enough for my history. I feel, too, with Marx that the function of my history is not so much to understand the world as to change it. If my history, by story and reflection, disturbs the moral lethargy of the living, then it fulfils a need. I have not silenced any voice by adding mine. Sahlins, in the meantime, was producing books of genius and creating paradigm shifts in anthropology. “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia” (Sahlins 1963b) set the parameters for discussion on cultural systems in the Pacific for twenty years. Culture and Practical Reason (Sahlins 1976b) was a major statement on the relationships between symbolic schemes of culture and the material constraints of physical living, an anthropological adjustment to accepted Marxism. In Stone Age Economics (1972) Sahlins fought against the reduction of economics to a need-satisfying rationalism, “an intellectual mode of Business.” The material life processes of society, in his view, were suffused with the same complexities as religion and politics and to the same end. He was, too, a passionate defender of cultural creativity in the great sociobiology debates of the 1970s and 1980s.



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Consistent through all this was Sahlins’s thesis that it was the cultural symbolic system that was the mode of ordinary human relationships. It clothed everything in discernible meanings. Meanings were discernible precisely because in the uniqueness of every experience there was also structure. Actions, gestures, expressions, rituals – every symbolic act – contained the specificity and generality combined in the famous Saussurean relationship of langue and parole. Cultures were as different as languages, as idiosyncratic within themselves as speech, but communicable because of their shared forms. Their differences were what made anthropology possible. The system in them, available to participants, was also available to the observer. Sahlins has always been skeptical, I think, of an anthropological history of one’s own culture. Difference, for Sahlins, has always been a cultural birthright and an anthropological Rosetta stone. I do not know what set Sahlins’s sights on Hawai‘i. I suspect that he was restless over unfinished business in Fiji. He rediscovered the quirky, maverick spirit of A.M. Hocart in Hocart’s own manuscript fieldnotes and Hocart’s study, Kingship (1927). Possibly Sahlins also discovered the value of enlarging Hocart’s insights into kingship through the whole of the Pacific, and he needed history to do that. Sahlins visited Australia in 1980: he went to Adelaide as president of the anthropology section of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS), and he became a founding member of the Pacific History Association formed in the Clare Valley that same year. I remember well the excitement of a younger generation of Pacific historians at Sahlins’s masterful performances. They were as startled by him in 1980 as I had been in 1956, and for much the same reasons. Suddenly, he was reading the texts they had read in new ways. He was seeing chieftaincy in the Pacific with the reflections born of decades of scholarship culminating in the discourses of Georges Dumézil and James George Frazer on the “stranger-king.” All of us had staged our own perceptions of the “kings” of the Pacific in the way the British, in particular, had created them to serve their imperial purposes. Sahlins, all of a sudden, displayed the ways in which Polynesian cultures could be entered by understanding the ways in which they balanced violent power and legitimating authority. Suddenly, too, a whole range of mythological and traditional texts became readable, not just for the old “Polynesian Problem” of where the islanders had come from, but for the way these texts created a narrative of

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the political and cultural adjustments made when violent strangers from the sea – the chiefs who came from “distant places” before the arrival of the Euro-Americans – came and lived permanently with the Natives of the land. Whatever took Sahlins to Hawai‘i, he found there the perfect theatre for his understanding, developed over thirty years, of how the structures of cultural systems merged with the unrepeatable particularities of cultural events. This was the killing of Captain James Cook by the Hawaiians in Kealakekua on 14 February 1779. The Natives of the land received Cook, a stranger coming from a “distant place,” during a season of the land (makahiki). The “Natives” called Cook, “Lono.” Lono was the “god” of makahiki. Sahlins’s anthro-history of the death of Cook makes sense of that. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (1981a) was Sahlins’s first definitive effort – if not his first revelation of his thesis – to weave this historical/mythical event into an understanding of anthropological theory. Then, in a series of most prestigious lectures in the most prestigious places the world over, Sahlins adjusted his argument, debated particularities, and filled out his proposition, becoming more certain in his thesis and more expert in his exhaustive knowledge surrounding the events. These lectures appeared as his Islands of History (1985a). During these years Sahlins put on hold a planned history of the Hawaiian islands to complete with Patrick Kirch what surely must be the most exhaustive “historical ethnography” and “archaeology of history” anywhere in the world of Native society under siege from intruding society and adapting to the changes. Anahulu (Kirch and Sahlins 1992, 2 vols), it is called. By any standard, it is a most extraordinary work. James Cook (1728–1779) was a Yorkshire villager and apprentice grocer, North Sea collier seaman, Royal Navy master at the battle of Quebec, Newfoundland hydrographic surveyor, Pacific explorer, fellow of the Royal Society, and culture hero. Cook is a man of myth and anti-myth and double-visioned history. In the history and theatre that colonizers made of him, Cook is the icon of humanistic, scientific empire. For the colonized, at least in the postcolonial period of the late twentieth century, Cook is the icon of the savage violence of empires in their encounters with Native peoples (Dening 2001a). In a sense, the general public and academic historians have been perfectly happy with the James Cook they had in the works of J.C. Beaglehole, Alan Villiers, and Richard Hough, and in literally hundreds of other biographies, histories, and coffee-table books. The



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only debate that seemed to interest them was whether Cook really did discover this or that island and place, or whether he had some secret knowledge of it all from the Portuguese. The general euphoria expressed in the reconstructed Endeavour suggests that culturally we still bathe in the sunshine of Cook’s humanism. Black Australians, Hawaiians, and Māoris don’t have that same sense of euphoria. What the “Natives” thought or did or had done to them is of no great interest when another sort of history has been thought to be “real.” Of course, that is not true for the cross-cultural histories being taught around the world in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States (but perhaps not Britain) these past twenty years, nor for the literature and histories creating the present discourse about the encounters between Indigenous peoples and empires in all their forms. However, public perceptions of what happened in two-sided history are at least twenty years behind understandings that are fairly ordinary in academia (Dening 2003b). In those circumstances “debunking” is good publishing theatre. An unsuspecting public can be surprised into noticing a change in the paradigm. In 1992 Gananath Obeyesekere “came out” as the great debunker in his The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European Mythmaking in the Pacific. Ostensibly, his target was the imperial mythmakers who found self-satisfaction in the fact that savages saw their envoys, notably Cook, as “gods.” Actually Obeyesekere’s target was Marshall Sahlins. Rather self-righteously, Obeyesekere claimed that his own Sri Lankan origins gave him understandings of “Natives” that Sahlins could never have. It is an unpleasant book, wrong on many counts, ignorant of Polynesian religious-political experience, and severely lacking in historical interpretive skills, and it is a book in which theoretical constructs override ethnographic experience. Sahlins had the right to be offended by this personal attack on him. His reply in How “Natives” Think: About Captain Cook for Example (1995) leaves no point unanswered, no insult not traded, no argument not closed. I suspect that not many readers have been patient with the detail. But then not many readers, especially reviewers and judges in prizes, had bothered to read Obeyesekere either. Most of reading in any case is the reduction of hundreds of thousands of words to a few sentences. The sentences to which Sahlins will be reduced are more important than all the sentences that will not be read. I would like to leave with one of his own. It goes to explain why How “Natives” Think is something more than

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a self-serving apologia. It holds the passion of four decades of his trying to see the hardest thing of all to see in anthro-history: difference. The ultimate victims, Sahlins says, in depriving them of independence of thought and in submitting their actions to some theoretical and ideological template, is the Hawaiian people themselves: “the Hawaiian people appear on the stage as the dupes of European ideology. Deprived thus of agency and culture, their history is reduced to a classic meaninglessness: they lived and they suffered – and then they died” (1995: 198). Sahlins prefers to give them a “real history” of their own. I have “way-found” my way to much the same conclusion as Marshall. We owe the past – of both sides of the beach, I would say – a “real history” of its own. I put it in different words. We owe the past as historians, we owe the people we observe as anthropologists, their own present, as they actually experience it. Their present – and ours – is always processual, is always in the present participle, I like to say. Ethnography, I have told my students for years, is about the present participle – not life, but living; not gender, but gendering; not culture, but culturing; not science, but sciencing. Not even change, but changing. I came to that conclusion long ago. When I compared the observations of Pacific island living by those who saw it from outside (from their ships or mission stations) and the observations of those who had to enter that living in some way (the beachcombers), I discovered that the set descriptions of roles, rules, and institutions, etc. offered none of the contingencies of the narratives of living experience (who actually marries whom, how tapu are obeyed, the distinctions of power and authority) of those who had left the comfort zones of their own cultures and experienced the behavioural metaphors of others (Dening 1974, 1980). Marshall and I have very different notions of what “real history” is. He will tell you that. He began his contribution, “The Discovery of the True Savage”(1994a), to my own Festschrift with a quotation from Lucian: “This then is my sort of historian … in his writing a foreigner, without city or country, living under his own law only, subject to no kin, nor caring what any man will like or dislike, but laying out the matter as it is” (41). Marshall followed with this: “Perhaps no one would be quicker to take issue with Lucian (or with me) than Greg Dening, since few scholars have explored the dialectic between our present and other peoples’ pasts than he, and perhaps



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no one has made the project of ‘laying out the matter as it is’ seem more chimerical” (ibid.). Marshall, dear friend, I began my MA dissertation on East Pacific prehistory (Dening, 1960b:ii) with this quotation from George Forster (1777): “The learned, at last grown tired of being deceived by the powers of rhetoric and by sophisticated arguments, raised a general cry after a simple collection of facts.” Oh, how proud I was of my distribution maps on “Elongated Ear-Lobes in Polynesia,” of “topknots,” of adze types, of the sweet potato, of pig, dog and chicken, of uninhabited islands, of accidental and deliberate voyages. You, Marshall, will know the “sophisticated arguments” of the likes of Thor Heyerdahl and Andrew Sharp that drove me to map topknots and gene frequencies and elongated earlobes. You will also know, Marshall, because you among anthropologists have practised it more than most, that “being there” for the historian is that feeling for the past that can only be matched by the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the years that we sit at the tables in the archives. It is an assurance that our extravagance with time here is rewarded with a sensitivity that comes in no other way. It is an overlaying of images on one another. It is a realization that knowledge of the past is cumulative and kaleidoscopic, extravagantly wasteful of our energy. And it is a pilgrimage. The past doesn’t come to me. I must go to wherever different cultural and social systems conserve it. Where ever that is – London, Paris, Boston, Leningrad, Nantucket, small archives and attics and drawers – it is most preciously on pieces of paper inscribed by pen or pencil in the moments they represent. It is precious to see the love or hate or pride or power in these millions of pieces of paper. But, Marshall, you are correct. The mysterious relationship between past and present has preoccupied my scholarly and professional life both as researcher and writer and as educator of those who will take our place. I use the word “mysterious” advisedly. I like a word some of us have invented, “historying.” History – the past transformed into words or paint or dance or music or play – is our noun. Historying is our verb-noun. Historying is the unclosed action of making histories. History, the noun, is closed, shaped, a product. Historying is process, never done, dialectical, and dialogic. Gossiping, explaining to the taxman, pleading not guilty to the judge, eulogies over the grave – historying actions are manifold, each with a moral dimension. Historying for those of us who

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are likely to be reading this is more defined – not by topic, not by period, not by method, not by style, not by interpretive agreement. None of us is the clone of any other. None of us is the clone of our teachers. None of our students is a clone of us. Our historying is as idiosyncratic as our fingerprints. Are we joined together in our historying, though? Yes, we are I would like to say. Historying is not just making history. It is also educating, supervising, examining, researching, reviewing, being members of professional associations, advising governments and institutions, giving public face to scholarship in the media, sharing the burdens of administration in committees of all descriptions, applying for research grants, being paid for some of it, being freely generous with time and energy for the sake of ideals, being conscious that all this is self-interested in personal ambitions, in institutional rivalries, in the scramble for funded support. There are schemers and frauds and nastiness in such historying. But altruism and ideals suffuse it, too. There is a passion that such knowledge is public, that it be subject to critical appraisal, that it serve a good greater than the individual’s fame (Dening 2002). For me, the joy of these last fifty years of historying (1957–2007) has been something of the exhilaration I had seen in the last fifty years of the eighteenth century (1757–1807). The “Enlightened,” they called themselves. “They dared to know,” as Immanuel Kant said of them. They dared to know by engaging themselves in the naming process of discourse. We know the comfort it brings. The “Enlightenment” of one century is the “structuralism,” “neo-Marxism,” and “postmodernism” of another. The recognition of keywords, a sense of the metaphoric nature of styles of thought, a feeling that what one has just read is what one was about to say, knowing the truth in the caricatures of oppositional stands made by one’s associates, knowing, on the other hand, how untrue the stereotypifications are of oneself – all the stuff by which paradigms are made – have given a wondrous lift to these past fifty years (Dening 1994). Marshall is worried by postmodernism. So am I. I have no use for it either as a literary or any other type of theory. But I am not worried by my postmodernity, or as I prefer to call it, my neo-modernity. My modernity is my respect for both the past and the present as something that has happened and is happening in a particular way independently of our knowing it. My modernity is born of the hundreds of years of knowledge advancement that have entered our



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souls. We see the advantage of perspective, of focused inquiry. We are bound to exhaustive research. My modernity demands that I be engaged at all times in critical dialogue and an effort to filter my knowledge as far as it is humanly possible from prejudice and error. We all have disciplined minds. That is our protection and our inspiration. I never let myself be called “interdisciplinary.” “Multi-disciplinary,” yes. It is my obligation to enter the economies of language and knowledge of all the disciplines I use so as to see their limitations, their ambiguities. But we belong to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We know the fictions of our languaging. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Clifford Geertz, Jacques Derrida, and hundreds of films and novels have told us them. We know both the possibilities and the limits of our knowing. We know how brokenly we know. We know as well that if we begin with the real, we will always have to enlarge it with imagination. This is our renewal of our modernity, our neo-modernity. This makes us different sorts of writers of history. We know our various voices, we know our author-ity. We know all the tricks of representation. This now is our realism, our non-fiction, if you like. It is invidiously selective to give a litany of names one would bless for their inspiration over fifty years of living discourse. But why not? In philosophy and theology: Joseph Maréchal, Teilhard de Chardin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Rahner. In history: Marc Bloch, R.G. Collingwood, R.H. Tawney, E.P. Thompson, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Robert F. Berkhofer, Bernard Smith. In reflective thought: Roland Barthes, Richard Rorty, Michel de Certeau. In anthropology: Claude Lévi-Strauss, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, Richard White, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and of course, Marshall Sahlins. And mentors. Who doesn’t need mentors? John Mulvaney, Harry Maude, Doug Oliver. For me the springtime of these fifty years was 1954–60. Botanists, glottochronologists, geneticists buzzed about the “Polynesian Problem” – where did the Polynesians come from and how? We discovered that disciplines were about creating languages and being comfortable with different sets of blinkers. These were years of innocence in which we read E.D. Merrill on botany, Bengt Anell on fishhooks, Roger Duff on adzes, A.C. Haddon and James Hornell on canoes, Peter H. Buck on material culture, Edwin G. Burrows on boundaries, E.S.C. Handy on religion, and Katherine Luomala on myths in the belief that we were doing history. We felt immodestly

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superior to the antiquarians of the Pacific – Elsdon Best, Percy Smith, and F.W. Christian. Their vast knowledge only served madcap theories about Polynesian origins and movements. In out of the way places from Finland to New Zealand, from Leningrad to Valparaiso, men and women had collected the products of their experience of the Pacific. We felt that there was not an archive or a library or a museum, a learned society or a colonial bureaucracy in all of Europe and the Americas in which ethnographic experience of the Pacific was not texted in some way. That immense variety of texts – logs, diaries, letters, journals, government reports, lectures, books, notes, written-down oral traditions, notes of memories – encapsulated the experience of those who made the texts as well as the otherness of nature and cultures that was experienced. We thought that the peculiar joy of Pacific history was to catch the seers, the seen, and the seeing. So, Marshall, I don’t think the relationship between past and present chimerical. I think it to be mysterious. “Mystery,” mysterium, is a word that comes out of Roman religious practices and sacramental theology. A mystery is a truth that is so complicated that it can only be experienced through play or parable or ritual. It has to be experienced in some way, and it will always be changed or enlarged in the experiencing. Mysteries are never closed. Mystery plays, whether they are of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ or in the calendaric struggle of Lono and Ku, are rarely predictors of behaviour. They are interpretive understandings in the moment after. The relationship between past and present is neither “chimerical” nor an “ever-decreasing hermeneutical circle.” It is a never-ending conversation. No sentence of ours will ever bring it to a full stop (Dening 2006). The present in that dialogue with its past is inevitably political. Aboriginality – a present connectedness or identification with a distanced and greatly different past – is the prime political issue for settler and post-colonial societies that have seen Indigenous peoples dispossessed of their lands, and their cultures consciously destroyed. Historying I take to be those sensual, emotional, mindful, bodily, and spiritual processes by which peoples collectively or personally read the signs of that surrounding metaphoric presence of the past and know that they truly belong to that past and that past truly belongs to them. Historying, for those seeking their Aboriginality in that sense, seems to have too broad a dimension and even an



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invalid one for those opposed to their political aspirations. But that denial itself is more political than ethnographically valid, it seems to me. Our own cultural historying is just as broad, and we have a very precise notion of its different validities in different cultural circumstances. I like to think of a phenomenology of the past, much in the same way as Walter Ong (1982: 73) wrote of the phenomenology of sound in an oral culture – its centring, surrounding action, rather than its directional qualities. The past, especially in traditional societies, like sound, is a surrounding, suffusing cultural environment of recognizable metaphors. That ever-present past is I. That everpresent past is We. Historying, in my understanding, is a common, everyday phenomenon. It is Everyperson’s fine sense of the poetics of their history making (Dening 1990). In the springtime, the years 1954–60, and now in the autumn, the years 2004–07, of my engagement with what I have learned to call the Sea of Islands, I met up with, and now have come to recognize in a new light, a most remarkable man: Tupaia was his name (Dening 1986, 1989; Salmond 2003: 113–34; Thomas 1997: 1–5; Williams 2003). I would like to tell his story as an example of the dialogue between present and past in the broad sense of this historying. In 1769 Tupaia created an image of the phenomenology of the past of the Sea of Islands: he drew a map. Tupaia was a priest from the sacred island of Ra‘iātea in the Tahitian cluster of islands. He was a priest in the formal sense of that word. He was a man of establishment, a guardian of tradition, a master of ceremony and ritual, and a man of sacrifice. In saying Tupaia was a priest, we are saying that he was not a prophet. The gods did not possess him, make him shiver and quake and speak in tongues, or manipulate good and evil fortunes. No, Tupaia was a priest, a political manager of supernatural worlds. Tupaia was a priest of ‘Oro. ‘Oro had come to the sacred island of Ra‘iātea on a rainbow. ‘Oro, as a feathered thing, travelled around the islands in his canoe called Rainbow. Rainbows, feathers, canoes – all of ‘Oro’s symbols were of crossings, between heavens and earth, air and ground, sea and land. ‘Oro’s temples were places of crossings. They stood on points of land looking to an opening in the reef. Taputapuātea was their name, Sacrifices from Abroad. Taputapuātea had narratives in their architecture about crossing beaches, about encounters in place, about assuaging violent power. ‘Oro’s canoe, bearing sacrifices on its prow, would beach itself on the Seaward

Figure 9.1a.  Tupaia’s chart. Drawn by Emily Brissenden, after 1.133, p. 130, in The Charts and Coastal Views of Captain Cook’s Voyages, vol. 1, The Voyage of the Endeavour 1768–1771, ed. Andrew David (London: Hakluyt Society, 1988).

Figure 9.1b.  Identifiable islands on Tupaia’s chart. Drawn by Emily Brissenden.

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side of Taputapuātea. Standing on a stone between the Seaward side and the Landward side, his feet too sacred to stand on the ground around, the ari‘i nui, the high chief, would eat the eyes of the sacrifices. That would soften the violence in him. He would then be wrapped in the feathered symbols of ‘Oro, be given his titles, and established in his authority by that. Then in a world turned upside down, he would have shit and semen poured over him, and be taught his proper place in the order of things by that, be made the shit of gods. On the Landward side of Taputapuātea was a place of communion. Sacrifice and communion always go together. It was a place of feasting. It was also a treasure house of sacred paraphernalia and memory. It was a place where traditions were sung and souvenirs of encounters were kept. A portrait of James Cook by John Webber was kept in the Taputapuātea at Matavai through all these years, as well as the red hair of the Bounty barber, as well as the skulls of two mutineers killed on the island. These Taputapuātea were Pacific representations of the sort of crossings that, in an island world, had to be made between sea and land. It was a liturgical map of the beach. Tupaia was the manager of the theatre of these sacred spaces. In fact, in 1760 he had brought from Ra‘iātea one of those stones on which the ari‘i stood to receive the sacrifices. That stone was the foundation stone transported from Taputapuātea on Ra‘iātea to Taputapuātea on Tahiti. I think that simple fact significant. Tupaia knew the civilizing processes in his own Native islands well. Tupaia knew the virtual realities of abstractions, the subjunctive world, the “as if” world of the reifications of state, kingship, law, economy. Tupaia would easily translate flags, uniforms, military order, and the theatre of power into something he understood. Tupaia first met the other world that would change his world forever in July 1767. It was at Matavai on the northwest coast of Tahiti. Captain Samuel Wallis’s Dolphin had been anchored there for a couple of weeks. They had been a terrible few weeks. The “Dolphins” had killed they did not know how many islanders – as many as a flock of birds, a shoal of fish, the Tahitians said. Tupaia came to Matavai when the relations between the English and the Tahitians were more settled. He came with Purea whom the English took to be Queen. They presumed they had killed her King in the first massacre. Purea, they would say, gave them Tahiti. Tupaia came with



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Purea from the Taputapuātea he had established for her. They came with Purea’s son, who held from his father and his mother the highest title on the island. They had already begun their translation of their encounter with the English. They would incorporate the flag of possession that Wallis had erected in Matavai into the sacred feather girdle of ‘Oro that would be wrapped around the ari‘i nui on his Taputapuātea stone. James Cook would later see it among the sacred treasures of ‘Oro’s temple and William Bligh was to draw it. When Tupaia boarded the Dolphin, the “Dolphins” sensed he was of superior rank, even a priest. They gave him the name Jonathan. Tupaia was curious about everything on board the ship. He learned things by touching and handling them, sometimes the hard way – that a teapot held boiling water, for example. A cameo portrait of Wallis’s wife sent him into raptures. It was a fascination with representation that never left him, as we shall see. The officers of the Dolphin fussed over him. They sat him down to dinner, a large dinner – chicken broth, roast fowl, roast pork, roast yams, plantains, bananas, soft bread, biscuit, apple pudding, apple pie, and a cup of tea. Tupaia mimicked the etiquette around the table, and was embarrassed when he got things wrong, like putting his fingers in the butter, or as they invited him to do for the laugh of it, wipe his mouth on the tablecloth, since he did not have a pocket handkerchief such as they used. There is much of the civilizing process in the private spaces of good table manners. Norbert Elias has taught us that. There is also much hegemony in the laughter at bungled Native mimicry of civilized ways. The Dolphins decked out their “Jonathan” in a complete suit of clothing before they left. In this garb and to their patronizing smiles, he returned to the beach and there delighted a large crowd of islanders with the theatre of his encounter. Tupaia’s next encounter was with James Cook and Joseph Banks. Tupaia’s political status had changed between the visit of the Dolphin and the visit of the Endeavour, but his usefulness to Cook and Banks was greatly enlarged. He was their guide, interpreter, and informant. In the end Banks decided to take Tupaia back to England. He would not cost as much as the lions and tigers his neighbours collected, Banks mused. Every encounter of the Endeavour with Indigenous peoples from that moment on was mediated by Tupaia – through the central

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Pacific, all around New Zealand’s north and south islands, all along the eastern coast of Australia. By the time they leave Australia, Tupaia’s body is scoured and bruised with scurvy. It has no immunity left against the fevers of Batavia. Tupaia is one of the first of thirty-six of Cook’s men to die there. Not before leaving us with a brilliant heritage, however. In the great cabin of the Endeavour, Tupaia saw James Cook bending over his chart table. He saw Sydney Parkinson, the painter, at his easel working his oils and watercolours. So Tupaia made a map of his ocean world, and he started painting. In his map and in his paintings we have Tupaia equipping himself with new skills to represent something old within him. They are Pacific representations of extraordinary brilliance, it seems to me. As Tupaia acted as the master of ceremonies for all of Cook’s encounters with Indigenous peoples, he insisted on the protocols that needed to be observed. Respect and reverence in body gesture and pose, exchange of true gifts not trade, and obeisance to the true titles of the place in that sacred space where they resided. (Marshall, a small note for you: I think that Cook after the disasters of the encounters to this point on this Third Voyage, remembered the instructions Tupaia gave him at Ra‘iātea and followed them at Kealakeua. Hence, all his out-of-character gestures as “Lono.”) In all of Tupaia’s encounters, he would engage himself in discussion of the titles and origins of the places he visited. It made him famous throughout New Zealand. Among the Māori, Tupaia was remembered for generations longer than Cook. The Māori named a cave for him where he slept, a well that he dug, and their children after him. For many years there has been a series of painting from the Endeavour identified only as by “The Artist of the Chief Mourner.” Just a few years ago, a note was discovered in Joseph Banks’s papers saying that “The Artist of the Chief Mourner” was Tupaia. By that they become an extraordinary archive of the 1769 encounter. Like his map of the Ocean of Titles, Tupaia’s paintings focus on the larger narratives of Tahitian life (Williams 2003). We have Tupaia’s map painting of Taputapuātea. He draws the Seaward sacrificial space separate from the Landward feasting and memorializing space, with ‘Oro’s canoe, Rainbow, in between. We have his depiction of long-distance navigational canoes and, in the background, the vegetable foods they brought: plantain, coconuts,



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and breadfruit. And we have the meeting place where their stories were told, As well as the war canoes. The sea was without the order of the land. We have the theatre of Tahitian memories – the musicians and the dancers. When Tupaia was in New Zealand, he painted the theatre of gift exchange, ruled over by the eye, the source of power. On the Australian coast, Tupaia was intrigued by the primitiveness of the canoes and the utter nakedness of the people. He painted a picture of the Gweagal people fishing Botany Bay – a vision of one about-to-be-colonized people of another about-to-be-colonized people. Tupaia called the Gweagal ta‘ata ino, “rubbish,” as the pool of sacrificial victims was called in Tahiti. He painted them deeply black: blackness unbleached by the cosmetics of the elite was the sign of their victimhood. And he saw their eyes. Tupaia always saw the eyes (Smith 1985). I find it hard to contain my wonder and awe at these Pacific repre­sentations, these transformations of Tupaia’s self into something else. All the way from Tahiti to Batavia, in whatever direction the Endeavour sailed or in whatever foreign conditions it reached, Tupaia always knew the direction of home and its distance. When the ship reached Batavia, the first thing that Tupaia noticed was that all the different peoples, different in their colour and their looks, wore their different Native costumes. Tupaia looked at himself and saw himself in the slops of ship’s clothing. He threw them away and dressed himself in his Native tapa cloth. That was his last gesture of identity; he died wrapped in the red tapa of his ari‘i and priestly status. James Cook arrived in the Sea of Islands in the Endeavour in 1769. He was there to observe the Transit of Venus. He was part of a longue durée of science that joined an ancient Greek, Eratosthenes, measuring the size of the earth from the shadows of poles in different places at noon, with Cook making his observations to measure the size of the universe from the solar parallax. Cook, of course, was observing the unobservable. He was not observing the extent of the universe. He was observing the evermore finely calibrated instruments and socializing himself to the “as if” world of his measuring, and immersing himself in a special language, and he came out realizing that he had seen unseeable distances (Dening 1995). Cook, however, was mystified. He did not yet know the vastness of the ocean around him. He did, however, know that only a few

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islands had been “discovered” to the European mind. Cook was to come to realize that there was not one island (from among some 10,000 to 15,000 of them) that had not been settled or visited, he knew not how many years before him. As it happened, Cook was to meet this genius among the Tahitians, Tupaia, who would tell him something of what he did not know. He told Cook of some 147 islands in the Sea of Islands that he knew of. He offered to draw Cook a map of them. Let’s look at Tupaia’s map (see Figures 9.1a and 9.1b). We don’t have Tupaia’s original drawing of his map. It has been lost. We only have English interpretations of it. Or rather we only have English misinterpretations of it. Tupaia’s Ocean of Islands arcs across 7,000 kilometres of the central Pacific, from the Marquesas in the east to the Fijis in the west. There are islands to which he himself has sailed – most remarkably, islands ten days’ sailing to the west from which it takes thirty days’ sailing against the prevailing winds to return. There are islands 600 kilometres across open sea to the south to which Tupaia pilots the Endeavour with pinpoint accuracy. A great number of the 70 islands on the map (he originally named 147) we can’t identify. Mostly this is probably because the names are as archaic as the knowledge they represent. There is something else as well. Tupaia’s map, as I now understand it, is an Ocean of Titles, or of sacred places where titles reside. It is these titles that Tupaia instructed Cook to acknowledge (Dening 1962; David 1988: 130–3; Forster 1996: 303–16; Finney 1998). Tupaia’s original map was a stilled moment in 1769 in the phenomenology of a 2,000-year past. Now, in these first decades of the third millennium, Tupaia’s map is an icon of how the present-day Sea Peoples of the Sea of Islands join themselves to it in their Aboriginality. I first studied Tupaia’s map over fifty years ago. It was a brilliant and innocent time of my academic life, as I have said. It was innocent because we thought that our expertise somehow gave us ownership of the past. I suppose it has been the most important lesson of my life to learn that the past belongs first to those on whom it impinges, and that one function of our expertise is to help give voice to those who truly own the past. At the time, fifty years ago, we were preoccupied by the thesis of a curmudgeon New Zealand scholar, Andrew Sharp (1956), who argued that the Pacific was peopled by accident. The legends of its



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peopling were pure myth, he claimed. We were innocent, too, in thinking that our argument with Sharp was purely academic. We did not understand how politically destructive Sharp’s thesis was to Pacific island, especially the Māori, cultural self-esteem. I just thought him wrong (Dening 1960a). I showed him to be wrong in my first performance of respectfulness. Respectful – and a sense of wonder. I had the deepest sense of admiration for this Sea People and their skills. I do all my sailing; I meet all my “Natives,” in the library. I’ve always felt that humility is a virtue that both historians and anthropologists should have. We live others’ lives so vicariously. We enter others’ metaphors so superficially. We need to be humble. We need to be respectful. That first act of respect, born of a trust that there was historical truth that I could discover in this past that engulfed the islanders, was to scour all the archival sources I could to discover all voyaging by Pacific Islanders done without European navigational technology. These voyages could be accidental or deliberate. I made a map of 218 of them (Dening 1962: 137–53). That map of 218 voyages allowed me to say how long deliberate voyages over open ocean could be, about 600 kilometres. Accidental voyages were not necessarily catastrophic because of the islanders’ capacity to make a landfall within a 300-kilometre circumference of even the lowest atoll. After that I had no doubt that these Sea People had made their Sea of Islands their own. They trade. They raid. They adventure. They way-find. They have an artifact of cultural genius to do it all, their va‘a, their canoe. Fifty years on, I read Tupaia’s map differently. In 1769 Tupaia was answering Cook’s questions. In 1954 I was countering Sharp’s arguments about the truth of Tupaia’s map. Now I look with even more wonderment at that map. A 2,000-year past is there, like sound, a surrounding presence in that map. Its historiography is of all the ways these islands came into the mind of one man, Tupaia, and was made present by stories told, by dancing them, by ritual memorializing. Tupaia annotated his map orally to Cook with stories of these islands, but Cook wasn’t interested in anything else than their direction and distance. In contrast, when Tupaia went to Aotearoa with the Endeavour, all he told the Māori of the Sea of Islands from which their ancestors came intrigued them. Tupaia is famous still among the Māori. Places and children are named after him (Dening 2004a, 2004b).

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Let me tell how present-day people of the Sea of Islands seek their Aboriginality inherent in the metaphor thatTupaia’s map holds. Let me say first that it would be fraudulent of me to insinuate that this story is about my engagement in the issue alone. There are scholars whom I admire immensely standing beside me here. To mention only a few: Thomas Gladwin (1970), David Lewis (1972), Patrick Kirch (2000), Roger and Kaye Green (1968), Patrick Kirch and Roger Green (2001), and Geoffrey Irwin (1992). In 1975 a friend of mine, Ben Finney, a fellow Harvard anthropology graduate, began a project for much the same reason that I had begun my studies of Tupaia’s map: to prove Andrew Sharp wrong. He wanted to do this by building a Hawaiian voyaging canoe and to sail, without intrusive navigational knowledge or instruments, the epic voyages of the island ancestors – between Hawai‘i and Tahiti, between Tahiti and Aotearoa, and between Fenua‘enata and Hawai‘i and Rapanui (Easter Island). These voyages have been an extraordinary achievement. There is no point in being romantic about them. The thirty years of this odyssey have had their pain and conflict, their tragedies and failures, their political machinations, their greed, and their absurdities. They also have been courageous overall triumphs, tapping wellsprings of cultural pride in a sense of continuity with a voyaging tradition. This has not just been in Hawai‘i, but in Tahiti, Samoa, and Aotearoa as well. Everywhere that he has gone it has been the same. The landfall has been a theatre of who island peoples are, who they have been (Finney 1994, 2003). I would like to go to 1995 when the theatre of this re-enactment voyaging came to a climax. Seven voyaging canoes collected at the sacred island of Ra‘iātea in the Tahitian group. Ra‘iātea was Tupaia’s island. There Tupaia had given Cook his first lesson in the protocols for a first encounter with islanders. On the shining liminal space of a beach where the waves soak into the sand – a space where important Tahitian ritual transformations were staged – Cook had been instructed to show respect by disrobing in some way, then he should offer pure gifts, not trade, then offer some sacrifice in the sacred space where the titles of possession of the island were kept. At Ra‘iātea was also Taputapuātea, perhaps the most sacred place in all the Sea of Islands, a place of sacrifice. Tupaia was its priest. The re-enactment voyages had long outlived their function as simply an argument against Sharp’s denial of their possibility. They



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had become signs of the living vitality of a long cultural past. The re-enactment voyages had become empowering metaphors of identity. That identity was a conjoined one – not just a sense of the legitimacy of their continuity with individual island cultures, but an identity of shared Nativeness to the Sea of Islands, and identity reaching back to that first remarkable voyage from Tonga to Fenua‘enata (the Marquesas). The accidents of my own intellectual engagement take me to this re-enactment theatre (Dening 2003a). If young islander scholars, and indeed their elders, were beside me here, they would be taking you to their poetry, their novels, and their plays. Or they would be describing to you their experiments in historiography in their doctoral theses. Their histories, they would tell you, are things of both mind and body. Their science is to be artful. They express their historiography in new modes, like dancing. Most of all, I think, they would be exposing to you the treasure trove of their languages to show to you how they are continually discovering that the English words they use, like past, future, history, time, and space, are infused with meanings that let them know how different they are from the hegemonic culture in their Aboriginality (Hereniko 1995, Kame‘eleihiwa 1992, Teaiwa 1994, Trask 1999, Wood 2003). Taputapuātea was an ideal place to play at this conjoined identity for the seven canoes (see Finney 1999; Dening 2004a, 2004b). The mythic songs the voyagers chanted were anthems of union and treaty. The themes of these chants were recognizable from as far away as Aotearoa, Tonga, and Hawai‘i. I suppose one of the greatest pleasures in these autumnal years of my scholarly life has been to describe that first settlement voyage (2,000 years ago) from Tonga to Fenua‘enata. The marvel of that voyage is that the twelve or so adults who made it had in their minds, bodies, and spirits all that we came to see as “Polynesia” from Aotearoa to Hawai‘i to Rapanui east of Tonga and Samoa. Catharsis, it seems to me is not a piecemeal thing. It is whole and one. It is a reduction of complexity to simplicity in a blink. Rituals, on the other hand, can be piecemeal, blaring, empty, contradictory, driven by many forces. So the ritual at Taputapuātea to welcome and send off the voyaging canoes was uncomfortable, hot, and boring to many there. The French powers-that-be were inclined to speak of such rituals as “folkloric” and bend to the politics in them with some cynicism, born of the belief that they are at least a boost to

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tourism. So at Taputapuātea, anti-nuclear protest songs competed electronically with ancient chants and fundamentalist Christian hymns expressing dismay at modern libertarianism. The experience of thousands was kaleidoscopic. But the catharsis was not. As the thousands took their leave, the social memory of it was one. They had looked at the past and seen the future. They were confident that their living culture was a metaphoric thing and that they had seen the metaphor at work in the Sea of Islands. These past twelve years I have become an “adjunct professor.” I don’t know what “adjuncting” is, but I do it very conscientiously. It is a sort of academic grandparenting. Young scholars come to me. We enjoy one another for a short time, and we all go home. I engage these young doctoral students from all disciplines and professions, from archaeology to zoology, in their creative imagination in the presentation of their scholarly knowledge. I challenge them to perform that knowledge in ways that they have never tried. I like as well to present them with the lights of the university also in performance mode – the professor of dancing beside the professor of astrophysics, the professor of literature beside the professor of anthropology, the professor of music composition beside the professor of history. None of us can speak to our expertise in such varied company, only to our experience, our ideals, our disappointments, our successes and failures, our tricks of trade (Dening 1992, 2000). Respectfulness, I tell them, is a performance art. You have to wonder a little in order to understand, to admire in order to enter someone else’s metaphor. You have to be silent to listen. You have to know yourself to know others. All of us are storytellers, I tell them. True storytellers, tellers of true stories, whether we are measuring the edges of the universe, whether we are sifting the dirt in our archaeological pits, or whether we are historying. We observe. We reflect. We write. We claim authority but have no other power than to persuade. We make theatre about trivial and everyday things, and about awful and cruel realities. Maybe we write to change the world. We tell our stories, but there is never any closure to them. There is always another sentence to the conversation that we have joined. There is always another slant on the story that we have told. We live by our creativity and originality, but we cannot plumb the depth of our



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intellectual and cultural plagiarism. Plato, Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and so many others are in our minds somewhere. So is our postmodernity, whether we like it or not. We know – because our everyday living performances are never separated from our academic performances – how liberated we have been by the painters, dancers, composers, film directors, novelists, and poets on our cultural horizons. Just by being everyday cultural performers in our own times we know that performance art engages the whole body, all the senses, all the emotions. Not just the mind, not just rationality. Performance art has given us a multitude of narrative strategies for our stories. We know that formulaic monotone won’t do what we want it to do – persuade, convince, change, enter into somebody else’s consciousness in a meaningful way. We have to be artful. We must take out the cliché, not just from our concepts and words, but from the very structure of our presentations. To be read, we must write to the tropes of our times (Dening 1990, 1993, 2002). Our ethnographies – our histories – I tell them must be art. There is no art in multiplying the reifications. Art is the dismantling of reifications. In art there is one cultural miracle. Every difference has a sameness. Every smallness a largeness. Every shape, every colour, every gesture a theory. In a performance art we need the directness of a novelist, the choosiness of a poet, the discontinuity of a filmmaker, the engagement of a violinist.

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2005b. “Hierarkia, tasa-arvo ja anarkian sublimaatio: Länsimainen illuusio ihmisluonnosta.” Suomen Antropologi 30(4): 3–18. 2005d. “Preface.” Ethnohistory 52(1): 3–6. 2005e. “Structural Work: How Microhistories Become Macrohistories and Vice Versa.” Anthropological Theory 5(1): 5–30. 2008a. “The Conflicts of the Faculty.” Anthropology News 49(1): 5–6. 2008b. “Leslie A. White.” New York Times Magazine, 19 Sept., MM82. 2008c. “The Stranger-King or, Elementary Forms of the Politics of Life.” Indonesia and the Malay World 36(105): 177–99. 2008d. The Western Illusion of Human Nature. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. 2008e. “Interview with Marshall Sahlins.” Anthropological Theory 8(3): 319–28. 2009a. “In the Absence of the Metaphysical Field: An Interview with Marshall Sahlins.” http://ucexchange.uchicago.edu/interviews/ sahlins.html. 2009b. “The Teach-Ins: Anti-War Protest in the Old Stoned Age.” Anthropology Today 25(1): 3–5. 2009c. “The Conflicts of the Faculty.” Critical Inquiry 35(4): 997–1018. 2010a. “Infrastructuralism.” Critical Inquiry 36(3): 371–85. 2010b. “The Whole Is a Part: Intercultural Politics of Order and Change.” In Experiments in Holism: Theory and Practice in Contemporary Anthropology, ed. Ton Otto and Niles Bubandt, 102–26. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. 2011a. “Twin-Born with Greatness: The Dual Kingship of Sparta.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 1(1): 63–101. 2011b. “What Kinship Is (Part One).” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(1): 2–19. 2011c. “What Kinship Is (Part Two).” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17(2): 227–42. 2011d. “Iraq: The State-of-Nature Effect.” Anthropology Today 27(3): 26–31. 2011e. “The Alterity of Power and Vice Versa, with Reflections on Stranger-Kings and the Real-Politics of the Marvelous.” In Power in History: From Medieval Ireland to the Post-Modern World, ed. Anthony McElligott, Liam Chambers, Ciara Breathnach, and Catherine Lawless, 283–308. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. 2012a. “Alterity and Autochthony: Austronesian Cosmologies of the Marvelous.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 131–60. 2012b. “Introduction to the New Edition: J. Prytz Johansen: Kant among the Maori.” In The Maori and His Religion in Its Non-Ritualistic Aspects [1954], ed. J. Prytz Johansen, viii–x. Manchester: HAU.

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2012c. “Discours de réception du doctorat honoris causa de l’université Paris-Descartes.” In La Culture et les Sciences de l’Homme: Un Dialogue avec Marshall Sahlins, ed. Erwan Dianteill, 241–52. Paris: Archives Karéline. 2013a. What Kinship Is – and Is Not. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013b. “Human Science.” London Review of Books 35(9): 29–32. 2013c. “Foreword.” In Beyond Nature and Culture, by Phillipe Descola, xi– xiv. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013d. “Dear Colleagues – And Other Colleagues.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(3): 337–47. 2013e. “Difference.” Oceania 83(3): 281–94. 2013f. “China U.” The Nation, 13 Nov.: 37–41. 2013g. “On the Culture of Material Value and the Cosmography of Riches.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(2): 161–95. 2014a. “On the Ontological Scheme of Beyond Nature and Culture.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(1): 281–90. 2014b. “Stranger Kings in General: The Cosmo-logics of Power.” In Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds, ed. Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad, 137–63. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2015a. “An Anthropological Manifesto: Or, the Origin of the State.” Anthropology Today 31(2): 8–11. 2015b. Confucius Institutes: Academic Malware. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

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Contributors

Manuela Carneiro da Cunha is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, as well as the University of Sã0 Paulo. She is also a member of the Brazilian Academy of Science. Her books include Negros, estrangeiros: Os escravos libertos e sua volta à Africa and História dos índios no Brasil. Greg Dening was the Max Crawford Professor of History at the University of Melbourne and adjunct professor at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University, Canberra. His books include Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self and Church Alive! Pilgrimages of Faith 1956–2006. Ann Fienup-Riordan is an independent scholar associated with the Calista Elders Council in Anchorage, Alaska. She earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1980 and has authored a dozen books on Yup’ik peoples. Jonathan Friedman is a professor of anthropology at the University of California at San Diego and Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He has conducted research in Hawai‘i and the Republic of Congo. Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is the author of Leviathans at the Gold Mine. Martha Kaplan is a professor of anthropology at Vassar College specializing in the study of ritual and colonial and post-colonial

292 Contributors

societies. She has done research in Fiji, India, the United States, and Singapore. Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mend Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories; Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter ; and Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. John D. Kelly is a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He does research in Fiji and in India, on topics including ritual in history, knowledge and power, semiotic and military technologies, colonialism and capitalism, decolonization and diasporas. Claude Lévi-Strauss was one of the greatest anthropologists of the twentieth century. A founder of structuralism, he held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France and was a member of the Académie Française. Jocelyn Linnekin is a professor of anthropology at the University of Connecticut. She studies ethnological theory, gender, cultural identity and nationalism, historical anthropology, and comparative politics as well as the Pacific Islands, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Joel Robbins is the Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University. He has carried out research focused on Christianity and cultural change among the Urapmin of Papua New Guinea and the rapid globalization of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. Daniel Rosenblatt is an assistant professor of anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa. He has conducted research in Aotearoa/ New Zealand on the performance and experience of local cultural traditions and identities in the context created by such transnational forces as capitalism, colonialism, modernity, and globalization. Serge Tcherkézoff is Directeur d’Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he specializes in the study of Samoa and in the history of European colonialism in the Pacific. His books in English include Oceanic Encounters, which he co-edited with Margaret Jolly and Darrell Tyron, and “First Contacts” in Polynesia.

Index

Aboriginal peoples. See Indigenous peoples Afghanistan, 25, 28 Africa, 123–4, 229 African Genesis (Ardrey, 1962), 11 Ahutoru, 144–5 Alaska, 24, 34, 182–202 Alaska National Guard, 191 Alaska State Department of History and Archaeology, 199 Alaska State Department of Transportation (DOT), 182, 185, 190–1, 199, 201–2 alcoholism, 159, 161, 168 Alexie, Eddie, 188 Almeida, Eulalia, 179n5 Amazon (state), 164 Amazon River, 155 American Anthropological Association, 9 Amsterdam, 206 A Mystificação Salexiana (Bandeira, 1923), 167 Anahulu (Sahlins, 1992), 4, 10, 21, 178–9, 242

Anatolia, 95 Anchorage, 184, 200 Anell, Bengt, 247 animals: domestication of, 93, 95, 97, 100, 103–4, 106, 111; hunting of, 103, 111, 184, 188, 196–7; killing of, 103–7 Aotearoa. See New Zealand A Palavra Viva de Deus (Conceição), 169 Aparecida, Our Lady of, 156–64, 171, 179n2 Apologies to Thucydides (Sahlins, 2004), 25, 27–9, 42 Apotheosis of Captain Cook, The (Obeyesekere, 1992), 21–3, 243 Appadurai, Arjun, 205 Arapasso people, 156 Arawak language, 172 archaeology, 38, 93–4, 100–1, 111–12 Ardrey, Robert, 11 Arens, William, 5 art, 98–101, 261

294 Index

Asad, Talal, 94, 114 Athens, 27, 51, 228 Australia, 14, 119, 238, 241, 243, 254–5 Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, 241 Aztecs, 16, 22 Baker, Thomas, 118 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 205 Bandeira, Alípio, 167 Baniwa language, 157 Baniwa people, 168, 172, 177 Banks, Sir Joseph, 149n4, 253–4 Baptists, 168 Barasana people, 179n7 Barcelos, 162, 169, 171, 176 Barrère, Dorothy, 19 Barthes, Roland, 247 Batavia, 254 Bateson, Gregory, 37, 50 Bau, 26–7, 51, 116 Bayrou, François, 231 Beaglehole, J.C., 242 Beirut, 59 Belém do Pará, 166 Beloff, Max, Baron, 239 Belting, Hans, 101 Benedict, Ruth, 6–7 Berkhofer, Robert F., 247 Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, 14 Best, Elsdon, 248 Bethel, 185 Bilderberg Group, 233 Blair, Tony, 208 Bligh, William (Captain), 127, 133, 253 Bloch, Marc, 247 Boas, Franz, 6–7, 13, 18 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 247 Bororo people, 180n11 Bosco, John, Saint, 180n9 Botany Bay, 255

Bougainville, Louis-Antoine de, 35, 136, 138, 140–1, 148, 150nn7,11 Bourdieu, Pierre, 18, 20, 110 Bouyeri, Mohammed, 215, 220 Brandeis, Eugen, 82–3 Braudel, Fernand, 18 Braund and Associates, 190 Brazil, 33, 152–81. See also Rio Negro Brewster, A.B., 113–32 British Empire, 114, 131–2n1, 132n2 Brown, George, 70–1, 137 Buck, Peter H., 247 Burrows, Edwin G., 247 Buruma, Ian, 206, 212–13, 216–17, 219 Bush, George W., 234 Butler, Judith, 204 Cagnari, Friar, 166 Cakobau, King of Fiji, 116, 120, 129 Calista Elders Council, 185 cannibalism, 16, 22, 180n17 capitalism, 23–4, 114, 207, 218 Carabixi, 164 Carew, Walter, 123, 129 Carruthers, R.H., 84–5 Caruru, 177 Cassiquiare River, 162 Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de, 28, 172 Çatalhöyük, 38, 95–104, 109 Cauvin, Jacques, 98, 101–2 Certeau, Michel de, 247 Chagnon, Napoleon, 30 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 247 Chambers, William, 84–5 Chanar, Brentina, 186–7, 189–90 Chanar, Cyril, 187–8, 195 Charlie, James, 192–3 Chevalier, Sophie, 6 China, 23, 29, 30 Christian, F.W., 248 Christian, William A., Jr, 162

Index

Christian Democracy (Italy), 231 Christianity: in the Brazilian Amazon, 33, 152–81; counterappropriations of appropriations of, 173–5; in Fiji, 116, 123, 129; function of icons in, 101; and the humiliation model of cultural change, 55–9; in Samoa, 66–7, 75; the “world created full” in, 117–18 Christu, Venancio, 172–3, 177 Christu, Vicente, 172 Cicero, 123 cingssiiget, 186 Clark, Grahame, 93 Clifford, James, 5, 247 Clinton, Bill, 234 cognitive anthropology, 99, 108 Cohn, Bernard, 33, 114, 130, 131–2n1 Cold War, 219 Collingwood, R.G., 247 Colo East, 129 Colombia, 155, 167, 171, 178 colonialism: in Fiji, 123–4, 129; in Hawai‘i, 21; and humiliation model of cultural change, 55; and multiculturalism, 224–5, 227, 232; and the origins of anthropology, 91, 114; Roman and biblical imagery in discourse of, 131–2n1 Columbia University, 7, 9, 165, 238 Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead, 1928), 137 Conceiçao, Bento da, 163, 169–71 Confucius Institutes, 30 conjuncture, structure of the, 16–20, 42–3, 65, 87 Constantine I, Emperor of Rome, 99, 174 Cook, James (Captain): account of expedition, 136, 149n4, 150n7; as exogenous force of change, 26; in popular history, 242–3; portrait by John Webber, 252;

295

Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate over, 4, 21–3, 243; and Sahlins’s theory of theogamy, 135, 150n8; and the structure of the conjuncture, 17, 19–20; and Tupaia, 253–8 Coppet, Daniel de, 135 Coppi, Friar, 166 “Cosmologies of Capitalism” (Sahlins, 1989), 92 cosmopolitanism, 206, 209, 226, 228 Cruz, Erivaldo Almeida, 181n21 Cruz, Jacinto, 179n5 Cubate River, 155, 177 Culler, Jonathan D., 47 cultural anthropology, 15, 24–5, 91–2, 108 culturalism, 182, 198–9 culture: as an adaptive organization, 10, 182; as basis for anthropology, 38; and demography, 232; as epiphenomenon vs autonomous force, 7, 14–15; and ethnicity, 208, 210, 223; and ethnography, 31–2; and globalization, 23–4, 198–200; and human relationships, 241; and the individual, 14, 17, 26, 48–9, 51–4; models of change of, 41–2, 44, 48–56, 60–1; and power, 114; and psychology, 53; replacing class, 222–5; and semiotics, 108; sui generis account of, 16, 22; as underdetermined, 92–3, 100 Culture and Practical Reason (Sahlins, 1976), 14–15, 92, 240 Culture in Practice (Sahlins, 2000), 18 culturology, 7, 13 Cunha, Manuela Carneiro da, 32–4, 36 Danish People’s Party, 222 Davidson, James, 19 Deeb, Lara, 59–60

296 Index

democracy, 87, 90n43, 209, 221, 229, 231 Democratici di sinistra (Italy), 231 Democratic Party (US), 225, 233–4 Dening, Greg, 19, 36, 127 Denmark, 222, 231 Derrida, Jacques, 247 Desana people, 173, 178 Deutsche Handels- und Plantagen Gesellschaft der Südseeinseln zu Hamburg, 81–2 Diamond, Stanley, 7 Dias, Gonçalves, 165 diasporas, 37, 124, 205 Diderot, Denis, 35, 135, 150n7 “Discovery of the True Savage, The” (Sahlins, 1994), 244 “Do Dual Organizations Exist?” (Lévi-Strauss, 1958), 228 dreams, 161–2, 173, 179n7 dualism, diametric vs concentric, 228–9, 235 Dubost, Jean-François, 228 Duff, Roger, 247 Dukumoi, Mosese, 114, 116–17, 126–31 Dumézil, Georges, 241 Dumont, Louis, 3 Düring, Bleda, 98 Durkheim, Émile, 53 Durston, Alan, 173 Easter Island, 10, 15, 150n9, 258 École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 13, 135 economic anthropology, 3 Ecuador, 180n11 Ekholm-Friedman, Kajsa, 229 Elias, Norbert, 253 Ella, Samuel, 70, 73, 75 Emperaire, Laure, 153 English language, 195, 259 Eratosthenes, 255

“Esoteric Efflorescence in Easter Island” (Sahlins, 1955), 238 Espírito Santo, 162, 169 essentialism, 220 ethnography, 32, 204–5, 244 Europe and the People without History (Wolf, 1982), 20 European Union (EU), 236n3 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 247 Evolution and Culture (Sahlins, Service, and Harding, 1960), 12, 238 evolutionism, 8–9, 12, 16–17, 108, 233, 238 “Evolution: Specific and General” (Sahlins, 1960), 12 Fanon, Frantz, 240 Fenua‘enata, 258–9 Fesche, Charles-Félix-Pierre, 138, 141–6, 148 Fienup-Riordan, Ann, 34 Fiji, 113–32; “begging” in, 4; cession to Britain and colonization, 116, 128–9; introduction of firearms to, 26; political leadership in, 70, 115–16; Sahlins’s work on, 9–11, 27, 238 Fiji Civil Service, 120 Fiji Museum, 113 Fiji National Archives, 113, 120 Finley, Moses, 27 Finney, Ben, 258 FOIRN (Federação das Organizações Indígenas do Rio Negro), 175, 181n21 Ford Foundation, 8 formalism, 47 Forster, George, 245 Fortuyn, Pim, 205–7, 211–13, 216, 221, 235 Foucault, Michel, 28, 204, 247 Fox News, 229

Index

France: intellectual debates of the 1960s, 13; political culture in, 222, 225–8, 231, 234; political elite in, 210 Frazer, James George, 241 Freeman, Derek, 134, 137 French Revolution, 221 Fried, Morton, 7 Friedman, Jonathan, 37 Front National, 222 Galvão, Eduardo, 165, 168 Geertz, Clifford, 3, 22, 247 Gell, Alfred, 101 gender: and alcohol abuse, 159; and immigration, 223; and interpretations of sexuality, 134, 151nn20–1; and Islam, 211, 214–15; and political structure, 134; and regional knowledge, 176–7; and traditional education, 191–2 Germany, 65, 80–3, 208, 222, 234 Gerschenkron, Alexander, 41 Giddens, Anthony, 208–9, 232 Gilman, Sander, 121 Gilson, Richard Phillip, 71–2, 75–6, 79, 82 Gitlin, Todd, 225 Gladwin, Thomas, 258 globalization: and cosmopolitanism, 226; and cultural difference, 198– 200; and “despondency theory,” 24; and post-colonial studies, 204; and radical centrism, 209, 232–3; and sovereigntism, 218 Godelier, Maurice, 13 Gogh, Theo van, 205–6, 213, 216, 220–1, 235 Golub, Alex, 135 González, Elián, 27, 51 Gordon, Sir Arthur, 119, 121, 124, 129

297

Graaf, Volkert van der, 212, 215, 220 Graeber, David, 28 Great Britain. See United Kingdom Great Transformation, The (Polanyi, 1957), 8 Green, Kaye, 258 Green, Roger, 258 Grimshaw, Anna, 28 Guadalupe, 170 Guarani people, 172 Gurr, Edwin, 84–5 Gurupá, 165 Gweagal people, 255 Habermas, Jürgen, 15 Haddon, A.C., 247 Handy, E.S. Craighill, 147, 247 Haraway, Donna, 28 Harding, Thomas, 11 Harris, Marvin, 5, 14, 16, 22 Hart, Keith, 28 Harvard University, 239 HAU (journal), 30 Hau‘ofa, Epeli, 4 Hawai‘i: compared with Samoa, 66–7; Obeyesekere’s account of, 22; re-enactment of epic voyages from, 258; Sahlins’s work on, 14, 21, 50, 92, 135, 178–9, 241–2, 244; system of political leadership, 71 head-hunters, 29 Henry, Joe, 185, 202 Henry, Teuira, 134 Heyerdahl, Thor, 245 Hill Tribes of Fiji , The (Joske/ Brewster, 1922), 33, 113–32 Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, 206, 214–15 historical anthropology: and colonialism, 130–1; experimentations with, 19; and post-colonialism, 24; and “real history,” 238–46; Sahlins’s

298 Index

projects of, 21, 114, 241–4; and structuralism, 17, 40–61 Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities (Sahlins, 1981), 20, 242 History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 26–7, 51 HM Bark Endeavour, 243, 253–5, 257 HMS Bounty, 127, 252 HMS Dolphin (1751), 252–3 Hobbes, Thomas, 10, 16, 25, 27–8 Hocart, A.M., 241 Hodder, Ian, 93, 95, 97, 110 Holl, Augustin, 98 L’Homme (journal), 13 Hooper, David, 190–1 Hope, Charles (Captain), 67, 76 Hornell, James, 247 Hoskins, Janet, 105 Hough, Richard, 242 How “Natives” Think (Sahlins, 1995), 22, 243–4 Hugh-Jones, Stephen, 179n7 Human Terrain System, 28 humiliation model of cultural change, 55–6 hunter-gatherers, 9, 14 hunting, 103, 111, 188, 196–7 Iarauetê, 155–7, 166–7, 171, 174, 178 Içana River, 155, 167, 172 immigration: in association with Islam, 212; and ethnicization, 208, 210; and failures of selfintegration, 215; Fortuyn’s call for moratorium on, 207; and multiculturalism, 217, 223–4, 227, 231; Van Gogh’s films on, 214 India, 101, 118–19, 123–6 Indigenous peoples: agency, 4; appropriation of foreign

intangibles, 152–81; and cultural continuity, 182; and the English language, 259; and globalization, 200; and historiography, 243– 4; mediated encounters with, 253–4; and modernity, 34, 201, 239; and occidentalism, 218– 20; segregation of children of, 167; and “sentimental pessimism,” 24–5; and settler societies, 248; stage of social evolution, 14; and the structure of the conjuncture, 65; use of hallucinogen, 179n7 Instituto Socioambiental, 175 internationalism, 217–18 Inuit people, 182 Ipanoré Rapids, 153, 155–6 IPHAN (Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional), 155 Iraq, 25–6, 28 ircenrraat, 182–3, 185–90 Irwin, Geoffrey, 258 Islam, 59, 210–15 Islands of History (Sahlins, 1985): and Diderot’s “Supplement,” 35, 135; and microdynamics of a single encounter, 20–1, 242; and Sahlins’s models of cultural change, 26, 50, 62n3; and semiotics, 110; on the specificity of old Hawai‘i, 92; and the structure of the conjuncture, 17 Italy, 231, 234 Jacoby, Eric, 225 John, Jolene, 185, 191 John, Mark, 192–3 John, Martina, 185 John Paul (pope), 185, 192–3, 195, 200

Index

299

Latour, Bruno, 28 Lattimore, Owen, 8 Lays of Ancient Rome (Macaulay, 1842), 127, 130 Lebanon, 59 Le gouvernement invisible: Naissance d’une démocratie sans le peuple (Joffrin, 2001), 210 Les indigènes de la république (France), 227 Kadavu, 127–8 Les Temps Modernes (journal), 13 Kalukaat, 192 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: on cultural Kamakau, Samuel, 20 appropriation, 172; on culture Kame‘eleihiwa, Lilikala, 4, 21 and cultural difference, 14, 45, Kamiko, Uetsu, 172 130; influence, 3, 247; on political Kamiko, Venancio, 172–3, 177 ideology, 235; Sahlins and, 13, Kant, Immanuel, 246 15; on structuralism, 203; theory Kapferer, Bruce, 204 of diametric and concentric Kaplan, Martha, 33, 36 dualisms, 228–9 Karapanã people, 173 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 163 Kassiyuk Dance Festival, 185 Lewis, David, 258 Kealakekua, 242, 254 Lewis-Williams, David, 93 Keane, Webb, 38 liberalism, 216, 219, 226 Kelly, John, 31 King of the Cannibal Isles, The (Joske/ Lima, 173 Lincoln, Billy, 188–9 Brewster, 1937), 113, 118–21 Linnekin, Jocelyn, 6, 21, 32 kingship: in Samoa, 63–90; London Missionary Society (LMS), stranger-, 28–9, 228–9, 241 67, 72, 79 Kingship (Hocart, 1927), 241 Lowie, Robert Harry, 7 kinship, 9–10, 30, 107 Lucian of Samosata, 244 Kipling, Rudyard, 117–19, 123, Lukács, György, 15, 34 126–7 Kirch, Patrick, 4, 21, 178, 242, 258 Luomala, Katherine, 247 Kirchoff, Paul, 8 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 127, Kroeber, Alfred L., 7 130 Kuduí (prophet), 172 Malietoa Laupepa, 63, 76–85 Malietoa Taimalelagi, 73, 75 La faute aux élites (Juilliard, 1997), Malietoa Talavou, 76–80 210 Malietoa Tanumafili, 84–5 language, 45–7, 61n1, 109, 204, Malietoa Vai‘inupō (Tavita), 72–5, 241, 259 Lapérouse, Jean-François de Galaup, 80 comte de, 136–40, 146, 150n10 Malinowski, Bronisław, 15, 238 John XXIII (pope), 170 John Paul II (pope), 170 Jones, Sir William, 130, 131–2n1 Joske, Adolph Brewster, 113–32 Joske, Paul, 120 Journal of Pacific History, 19 Juilliard, Jacques, 223 Jumbo, Thomas, 193

300 Index

Manaus, 155, 171, 175, 177 Manono, 77 Māori language, 151n19 Māori people, 243, 254–5, 257 Marcus, George, 5 Maréchal, Joseph, 247 Margalit, Avishai, 212, 216, 219 Marquesas, 147, 150n9, 256 marriage: in the Amazon, 159, 161, 176; in Polynesia, 133, 135–40, 142–6, 148 Martini, André, 181n21 Marx, Karl, 4, 8, 15, 236, 240 Marxism, 13, 17, 24, 240 Mata‘afa Fagamanu, 76 Mata‘afa Iosefo, 78–81, 83–4 Matavai, 252–3 Maude, Harry, 247 Mauritius, 124 McFate, Montgomery, 5 McGregor, Davianna, 21 Mead, Margaret, 6–7, 134, 137, 147, 151n20 Meggitt, Mervyn, 9 Melanesia, 11 Melbourne, 119–20, 238 Melbourne University, 239 Melkert, Ad, 212 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 130 Merrill, E.D., 247 Meskell, Lynn, 100 Mintz, Sydney, 7 Mithen, Steven J., 102 Moala, 9–10 Moala (Sahlins, 1962), 10, 21, 135, 238 modernism, 208, 216, 221–3 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 7 Morrison, James, 134 Moses, Charlie, 194 Moses, Phillip, 194 Moses, Theresa, 198 Mouvement démocrate (France), 231

Mraz, Jacqueline, 23 Muller, Sophie, 167, 172 Mulligan, James H., 75 multiculturalism: as an elite ideology, 208–9, 211; and colonialism, 226, 232; emergence of, 219; and the left, 217, 223– 5; and liberalism, 216; and occidentalism, 221 Mulvaney, John, 247 Murdock, George, 13 Murphy, Robert, 7 Muslim Brotherhood, 214 myth, 235 Nadarivatu, 118 Nakamura, Carolyn, 100 Nakauvadra Mountain Range, 116 Nanterre University, 13 Nassau-Siegen, Charles Henri Nicolas Otton, prince de, 140–1, 145 National Academy of Sciences, 30 nationalism, 200, 207, 221, 225–7, 233 nation-states, 205, 220–1, 225, 227–8 Navaho sand paintings, 101, 109 Navosavakadua, 114, 116–17, 126–31 Nazaré, 155, 177 Nelson, Edward, 187 Nelson Island, 182–202 neo-conservatism, 229 neo-liberalism, 204, 208, 211, 226 Neolithic period, 98, 103 Netherlands: political culture, 205, 209, 211–15, 218, 226–7, 231; recent history, 207–8 Neue Mitte (Germany), 208, 222 Newell, J.E., 82, 84 New Labour (UK), 208 New Public Management (NPM), 209, 222

Index

301

personhood, 186–90, 195, 197 Piero, della Francesca, 180n19 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 231–2 Pira-Tapuia people, 156, 173, 177 Pius X (pope), 166 Polanyi, Karl, 8, 10 Polynesia: contact with Western powers, 65; as laboratory of cultural evolution, 8; origins of people in, 247, 257–60; political leadership in, 11, 67; sexuality in, 133–51. See also Fiji; Hawai‘i; New Zealand; Samoa; Tahiti Obeyesekere, Gananath, 4, 21–3, Polynesia Company, 120 35, 150n8, 243 “Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man, occidentalism, 37, 207, 212, 215– Chief” (Sahlins, 1963), 11–12, 14, 21, 226 Occidentalism (Buruma and Margalit, 240 Portugal, 180n12 2004), 216, 219 Occupy Wall Street movement, 234 Portuguese language, 153, 157, 167, 177, 180n12 Oliver, Doug, 247 post-colonialism, 21–2, 24–5, 204, Ong, Walter J., 249 Oraison, Henri de Fulque d’, 140–1 220, 225 postmodernism, 23, 25, 34, 246 orientalism, 219–20 post-structuralism, 24 “Original Affluent Society, The” (Sahlins, 1968), 13–14, 91–2, 152 power functionalism, 61 practice theory, 4, 23 Orinoco River, 173 Prickly Paradigm Press, 28 orixá worship, 181n22 primatology, 9 Ortner, Sherry, 4, 18, 20, 23 Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Ottoman Empire, 221 Economies (Polanyi, 1968), 8 “Our Sea of Islands” (Hau‘ofa, Pritchard, William T., 140 1993), 4 Prodi, Romano, 231 Protestantism, 160, 167–8, 178, 207 Pacific History Association, 241 psychoanalysis, 18 Papua New Guinea, 11, 24, 56 Puck of Pook’s Hill (Kipling, 1906), Pará, 158–9, 165 118 Paraíba River, 179n2 Pulepule, 79 Parkinson, Sydney, 254 Purea, 252–3 Partito Democratico (Italy), 231 Pea Tavini, 80 Qalulleq River, 194 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 95, 109 Qasginguaq, 184, 187, 190–5, Pentecostalism, 167 199–200 performance art, 260–1 qasgit, 191–2 Pernambuco, 165 New Zealand: anthropology in, 243, 256–7; early encounters in, 150n9; Kipling on, 118; in re-enacted voyages, 258–9; Tupaia’s visit to, 254–5, 257 Nheengatu lingua franca, 157, 177, 180n12 Nightmute, 184, 190–1, 193–7 non-human persons, 186–90, 195, 197 Nunakauyak Traditional Council, 190, 199

302 Index

Qing Empire, 23 Querari, 155, 178 qununit, 186 Race, Language, and Culture (Boas, 1982), 18 racism, 210–14, 218, 223–4, 227 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 15 radicalism, 209 Rahner, Karl, 247 Ra‘iātea, 249, 252, 254, 258 Rapa Nui, 10, 15, 150n9, 258 Rarotonga, 67 Redfield, James, 27 Reginaldo, 155–7, 159, 171, 176, 178 religion: archaeological artifacts as evidence of, 96, 98–103; and occidentalism, 220, 223; orixáworship, 181n22; and political ideology, 235; as principle of constituted realities, 94; and structuralism, 108. See also Christianity; Islam; ritual; Roman Catholicism Republican Party (US), 229, 233–4 Rewa, 26–7, 51, 116 Rewards and Fairies (Kipling, 1910), 118 Ricoeur, Paul, 204 Rio Negro: appropriation of religious symbols in, 178; Carmelite order in, 158–9, 164– 5; course, 155; in extractive economy, 180n8; Indigenous people of the Middle, 161; Indigenous people of the Upper, 157, 161, 168, 171, 179n7; map, 154; Salesian order in, 167 ritual: and ambivalence, 229; and art, 99; and group status, 57–8; and materiality, 104; missionaries’

attitudes to, 167, 175, 178; organizational basis, 165, 181n22; and taboo, 146; vs catharsis, 259. See also religion Robbins, Joel, 38–9 Roman Catholicism: Carmelites, 164–5; Franciscans, 165–6; Indigenous appropriations of, 33, 153–81; Jesuits, 153, 157, 165, 172, 177, 180n12; lay brotherhoods, 165–6, 168; official vs popular, 175–6; in Samoa, 79; Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), 156, 170, 178. See also Salesian order Roman Empire, 131–2n1 Rorty, Richard, 247 Rotterdam, 213 Rotuma, 127–8 Royal Anthropological Institute, 124 Rubin, Gayle, 4 Rudall, Nicholas, 27 Ryan, Michael, 117 Sahlins, Marshall: career, 9–16; debates with other scholars, 4–5, 21–3, 35, 150n8, 243; education, 6–9; and historical anthropology, 40–4, 61, 110– 11, 113–14, 236, 243–4; on Indigenous peoples and indigenization, 152, 200; influence, 3–6, 91–3, 152, 178– 9, 204, 238, 240; “method of uncontrolled comparison,” 205; models of cultural change, 50–6, 62n3, 182; political activism, 12, 30; on “powerism,” 61; on religion, 94, 175; theory of theogamy, 135, 149, 150n8; theory of the structure of the conjuncture, 16–20, 42–3, 65,

Index

87; understanding of culture, 61, 92, 99, 117, 131, 182, 198–9, 241–2; work on political culture, 235; work on the “stranger-king,” 28–9, 228, 241. See also individual publications Sahlins, Peter, 228 Said, Edward, 5 Salamasina, 71 Salesian order: in Ecuador, 180n11; founding, 180n9; in Iauaretê, 156; possession of Indigenous artifacts, 175; resistance against appropriation of Catholicism, 174; and Rio Negro Province, 166–8, 179n7; selection and instruction of catechists, 169 Salmond, Anne, 150n6 Samoa: kingship in, 32, 63–90; in re-enacted voyages, 258–9; sexuality in, 134–5, 137–40, 147– 8; terms for young, unmarried woman, 151n19 Samoa Times, 74, 78, 80 Santa Catarina (state), 169 Santa Isabel, 153, 155, 157, 168, 171, 176–7 São Gabriel da Cachoeira, 153, 157, 169, 177 São Paulo, 178 Sapir, Edward, 6 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 17, 34–5 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 45–7, 61n1, 241 Savage, Charley, 26 Savai‘i, 69, 77 Scammon Bay, 196 Scandinavia, 222 schismogenesis, 37, 50–1, 55, 211 science, 18, 34–5, 95, 203, 236, 255 Scientific American (journal), 11, 15 Scotland, 119, 122

303

Search for a Method (Sartre, 1963), 17, 34 Seligman, Charles Gabriel, 137 semiotics, 107–12 September 11th attacks, 25–6, 210, 212 Sewell, William H., Jr, 42, 48–9, 53, 62n2 sexuality, 133–51, 207, 211, 216, 221 Sharp, Andrew, 245, 256–8 Shuar people, 180n11 slavery, 228 Smith, Bernard, 247 Smith, Percy, 248 Snow, Philip, 120 social anthropology, 92, 99 Social Stratification in Polynesia (Sahlins, 1958), 8–9, 12, 238 Solf, Wilhelm, 85 Somalia, 214 sovereigntism, 211, 218–19, 221, 231 Soviet Union, 219 Sparta, 51, 228 SPI (Serviço de Proteção aos Indios), 167 Stair, John, 73 “Spirit of the Gift, The” (Sahlins, 1968), 13 Stanford University, 220 Steinberger, A.B., 79–80 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 89n10, 90n36 Steward, Julian, 7–8, 10 Stone Age Economics (Sahlins, 1972), 3, 13, 240 structuralism: and the assassinations of Fortuyn and Van Gogh, 221, 235–6; and free will, 205–6; and Marxism, 13; and materialist semiotics, 108; and the notion

304 Index

Trask, Haunani-Kay, 20 Tribesmen (Sahlins, 1968), 19, 24, 36 Trilateral Commission, 233 Trinidad, 124 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1958), 45 Tuimaleali‘ifano Sualauvi, 77 Tuinaceva, Setariki, 120, 127 Tuka movement, 116, 118, 126–7, 130 Tukano language, 157, 172 Tukano people, 156, 177 Tulik, Camilius, 192–4, 197, 200 Tahiti: in re-enacted voyages, Tundra Drums (newspaper), 185 258; religion in, 249, 252, 255; Tunuí, 177 sexuality in, 135–8, 140–6, 149; Tununak, 184, 192, 195 Tupaia’s depictions of, 254 Tupaia, 249–58 Tapereira, 158, 163 Taputapuātea, 249, 252, 254, 258–60 Tupi language, 157 Tupi people, 172 Taracuá, 156 Tupua Tamasese, 79, 81–3, 85 Tariano people, 155–6, 166, 173, Turi River, 173 178 Turner, Peter, 66–7, 77, 137 Tawney, R.H., 247 Turner, Victor, 247 Taylor, Charles, 22 Tuyuka people, 173, 177–8 Taylor, Meadows, 124–5 Tylor, Edward, 238 Tcherkézoff, Serge, 35–6 Tea Party (US), 234 Uaupés River, 155–6, 165–6, 178 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 247 Ulurruk, 193 theogamy, 134–5, 149, 150n8 Umkumiut, 185, 192 Third Way, 208, 222, 230 UNESCO, 179n4 Thomas, Saint (apostle), 153 United Kingdom: anthropology in, Thomas, Nicholas, 4 238, 243; Kipling on history of, Thompson, Bobby, 27 118; and notions of “kingship,” Thompson, E.P., 247 241; political culture, 208, 222, Thucydides, 5, 27 226; and Samoa, 65, 75–6; and Thurston, Sir John Bates, 122 Tahiti, 252–3 Tilly, Charles, 37 United States: anthropology in, Tim, David, 192 238, 243; Civil War, 120; Elián Toksook Bay, 184, 190, 195–6 González case, 27, 51, 54; foreign Toksook Bay Tribal Council, 192 policy, 87; invasion of Afghanistan, Tonga, 66–7, 70, 115, 150n9, 259 25, 28; invasion of Iraq, 25, 28; Trade and Market in the Early Empire missionaries from, 167; political (Polanyi, 1957), 8 culture in, 225, 229, 233, 234; “Traffic in Women, The” (Rubin, protests against Vietnam War, 12, 1975), 4 of synchrony, 44–5; and realism, 203–4; Sahlins and, 15, 17, 29, 42 Submission (film), 214 substantivism, 10 Sumba, 100, 104–6 Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage Around the World (Diderot, 1796), 135 Suva, 120 Sweden, 208–10, 222, 224–8 Swedish Democrats, 222

Index

28; and Samoa, 65, 75–6; in Theo van Gogh’s film, 213 Upolu, 69, 76 Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, 13 University of Chicago, 9, 14 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 6, 9 Urapmin people, 56–9 Urubuquara, 156 Use and Abuse of Biology, The (Sahlins, 1976), 16 US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), 196, 202 Usugan, Frances, 187–9, 192 Uttereyuk, Mike, Sr, 196 Valeri, Valerio, 106 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 180n15 Vatukaloko people, 128, 129 Vaujuas, François René Charles Treton de, 146 Vayda, Andrew, 11 Venezuela, 167, 171 Veríssimo, José, 165–6 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 27 Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, 63, 81–2 Vietnam War, 12, 28 Villiers, Alan, 242 Viti Levu, 113–16 Vollen, Barbara, 238 Wagley, Charles, 165 Waiting for Foucault, Still (Sahlins, 2002), 34 Walbiri drawings, 101 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 165–6 Wallis, Samuel (Captain), 252–3

305

Wanano people, 156, 178 Waters, J.H., 122 Watkins, Trevor, 102 Webber, John, 150n10, 252 Weber, Max, 37 welfare states, 207–9, 229, 231 West Africa, 181n20 Western Illusion of Human Nature, The (Sahlins, 2008), 10 Westin, Charles, 224 What Kinship Is – And Is Not (Sahlins, 2013), 30 White, Hayden, 247 White, Leslie: “culturology,” 7, 13; debunking of American beliefs, 10; determinism, 17, 38; evolutionism, 12; and Franz Boas, 7; and Marshall Sahlins, 6, 8–9; on religion, 94 White, Richard, 247 Whitehouse, Harvey, 99 Wilkes, Charles, 72 Williams, John, 72–3, 75, 149n4 Williamson, Arthur, 131n1 Williamson, Robert Wood, 137 Wittfogel, Karl, 8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 110, 247 Wolf, Eric, 3–4, 7, 9, 20, 114 World Economic Forum, 233 Wretched of the Earth (Fanon, 1965), 240 Wright, Robin, 180n16 xenophobia, 210, 218, 225, 228 Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, 196 Yup’ik language, 184, 191, 195 Yup’ik people, 184–202