Kastom in Melanesia: An Overview ROGER M. KEESIXG- [n Africa, in Asia, the colonial experience entailed a systematic denigration of ■na[jve' ways, •heathen' religion, and 'barbaric' customs. Through Christianity and education in a Western mould, those who (eft die villages were led to despise the ways of their ancestors as they left them behind. The ideology of decolonization has in many parts of the Third World taken as a central theme a reversal of this rejection of the past. The variations on this theme are diverse: Black is Beautiful, the romanticiza-tion of 'LraditionaJ' village life (as in idealized views of the pre-British Hindu village in India), adoption of 'traditional' dress by emergent elites, political use of old symbols, and so on. ' In Melanesia colonial domination came ■,.' relatively late: and so did decolonization. The new political elites of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu have been schooled in the rhetoric of African independence — Nkrumali. Toure, Nyerere, Mcmnii, Fanon, and the rest. It is scarcely surprising that the leaders of the new Melanesia often idealize the pre-colo-niaJ past, that they appeal to nationalist sentiment and seek to fashion a positive sense of identity with rhetoric about The Mclanesian Way. The contemporary use of kastom, 'custom', as political symbol is in (his sense not unique, and not endogenous to Melanesia. Vet there is more to it than this — more titan a superficial 'Mclanesianizing' of the anticolonial rhetoric of black Africa by leaders faced with a similar dilemma of creating nationhood out of tribal fragmentation. The contemporary uses of kastom as political symbol have a special anthropological interest, for several reasons. * Departmenl of Anlhropology. Research School of Pacific Suidii-í. The Auslr.ili.iii National Univcrsily, Canberra. First, for some areas at least the use o: kastom as a symbol of the anticolonia.' struggle has an older history than this Kastom as political symbol goes back to ar earhcr generation of Melanesian freedorr fighters who forged their ideologies fron sources quite different from those of the radical students at the University of Papu: New Guinea and the University of the Soul! Pacific, Second, kastom as Melanesian poiitica.' symbol represents significant continuing with other, earlier, modes of anticolonia siruggle. The rhetoric, the political strate gies, and indeed the goals may have shiftec dramatically in the century since seaboarc Melanesia was invaded and progressive!;, subjugated: but there are, I will argue, significant continuities we may fail at first tc perceive. That leads, then, to a third poin of anthropological interest: that Melanesia! appeals to kastom are distinctively Melane sian, however influenced they may now hi by exogenous ideologies. Fourth, the uses of kastom illustrate ii particularly striking ways the nature of poli tical ideologies and the role of abstract sym bols in them: the extent lo which deep con tradictions can be disguised and denied; the diverse uses to which such abstract symbol can be put. to defend old ways or chane. them radically, to assert national or supra national unity or promote regional separat ism, and so on. Kastom is an apt ant powerful symbol precisely because it car mean f almost) all things to all people. But how, in Melanesia, with all its cul tural and linguistic diversity, can 'custom be a symbol of unity beyond the boundarie of language and culture that separate islands, or more often cut islands into strip and patches? That leads to a fifth point o interes: from both historical and anthropo logical perspectives. How can peoples witl AUGUST, 19S2 MANKIND Vol 13 No. 4 (partly) different cultures and mutually unintelligible languages appeal to a common kastoml The pidgin label itself gives us some clues, since it points us back toward the decades of plantation labour in which a Melanesien counter-culture of survival, which has never been studied by anthropologists, was created. Finally, kaslom is oF special anthropological interest because what serves as symbol is culture itself — or so it would seem. What is the relationship between a culture as lived and a culture as abstract symbol? The process of self-reflexivencss in which peoples externalize their cultures raises fascinating questions of cultural theory, as well as socio-political process. Let me expand on each of these points, First, the lime depth of kastom as political symbol can be illustrated with the Malaita (Solomon Islands) cases discussed in Burl's paper and in my own. Kastom emerged as a central element in political ideology on Malaita as early as 1946, in the formulations of Maasina Rule by 'Are'are leaders (Kcesing 1978: Laracy 1979). There may well have been non-Melanesian sources for some elements of this ideology, but there is no evidence lhat the idea of codifying 'custom' and presenting an idealized reformulation of indigenous political system and customary law to the colonial authorities came from external sources. Contemporary Solomon Islands leaders appeal to 'the Melanesian way', and have made concessions to customary law and ways in framing the constitution of their new nation; but the power of kastom as political symbol on Malaita (and other islands that were engaged in Maasina Rule) comes from other, older, sources. Similarly, in Vanuatu the symbolic importance of kastom on islands such as Tanna and Pentecost, derives from earlier periods of anticolonial, autichristian resistance (as with John F rum on Tanna). To villagers in such areas, kastom derives its motive power from the often mystical political cultism of the past, continuing into the present, even though leaders at national and provincial levels, schooled in ideologies of black nationalism and far removed from village life, may seek to draw on this power for their own purposes. It is partly because the views from the village and the views from the houses on the hill where the expatriate officers used to live contrast so sharply that kastom can mean such different things to different people in contemporary Melanesia. The older roots of kastom take us back to an earlier history of anticolonial resistance. One problem in understanding the politics of traditionalism in contemporary Melanesia comes, I believe, from a fairly systematic failure to recognize the anti-colonial political core of many older movements because of the mystical and millena-rian terms in which they were cast. If neo-traditionalism in Melanesia, in its Vanuatu or Solomons or Papua New Guinea forms, is more overtly concerned with political issues than old 'cult' movements were, this may represent a more realistic engagement with the powers of governments, colonial and post-colonial, than was possible thirty or fifty or a hundred years ago; but many of the themes and aspirations being expressed today have long histories that go back to initial acts of armed resistance to European invasion (Kcesing 1978). What 1 am suggesting is that it is we, the outside observers, who have changed, as well as the Melanesians. In our grandparents', even our parents', generations, 'the natives' had no political rights, no sovereignty, nothing to aspire to but accommodation to Western ways and Western domination. That Melanesians now express their aspirations in a form we can understand reflects both less mystical idioms on one side and less racist and colonialist premises on the other. Kastom as political symbol in many parts of village Melanesia, with its mystical overtones, represents themes and ideas that are distinctively Melanesian. I have argued elsewhere that given a Melanesian world view in which the support of ghosts and 29S |g| ms AUGUST, 1982 MANKIND Vol. 13 N^- 4 spirits was sought for all worldly ventures, and in which outcomes of human effort as well as 'natural' events were constantly scanned as evidence of 'supernatural' sup-part or withholding of support, it was both appropriate and inevitable that political resistance of all forms be 'religious' in character and, to the Western eye. mystical and irrational (Kcesing 1978). Where ancestrally ordained ways themselves became a focus of political ideology, particularly in communities resisting Christianity, kastom was accorded sanctity because of, and through, the power of ancestors. The power of ways enjoined by ancestors is greater than the power of rules created by contemporary humans; even though in Melanesia humans may edit, interpret, alter, or invent rules as kastom, the rules are accorded ancestral legitimacy. Hut even accepting this, we as observers may be hard pressed to understand the value Melanesians on Malaita or Tanna place on sitting around endlessly talking about kastom, to understand what sustains meetings and community efforts year after year in the absence of visible benefits. Whence derives the sanctity of the thousands of exercise books on Malaita filled with genealogies (usually on biblical lines) and lists of rules, taboos, shrines, and so on0 It is easy to forget that in pre-Christian Melanesia words themselves had power to change the world — in magic, in curses (Keesing 1979:31-3), in prayer. One way to interpret the endless talk, the interminable meetings, in Maasina Rule and John F rum and Nagriamel and other movements old and recent, is to say that in objective circumstances of subjugation, where there is a total disparity of physical power, talk is a kind of sublimal political action, a displaced mode of resistance. Perhaps: but the power of words makes it a form of resistance that in the eyes of participants changes the world, though in the eyes of the observer it may change nothing. My point, illustrated through the papers that follow, is that the politics and rhetoric of kastom, like 'cargo cults' and other politico- religious movements, represent distinctively Melanesian creations. 1 have suggested that kastom in contemporary Melanesia can illuminate more general questions about ideologies and political symbols. The ways kastom as symbol disguises and mediates contradictions emerge strikingly in the papers that follow. People who decades ago abandoned their ancestral religion and most overt manifestations of custom profess their adherence to kastom. Politicians raised in urban settings and educated overseas proclaim the virtues of a kastom they have never known. Capitalists destroy communalism in the name of kastom. In enclaves where ancestral customs and religion still govern everyday life, men may talk one day a week about kastom in ways that radically distort everyday reality (Keesing 196S). Kastom as symbol has a hypnotic power to help people believe, at least temporarily, they are what in fact they are not. i Kastom not only illustrates the process of mystification; it shows how abstract symbols can derive power precisely because of their vagueness and vacuity. That urban sophisticate and mountain pagan can find meaning in kastom attests to the potency of contentless symbols. The diversity of meanings Melanesians attribute to kastom underlines the way such symbols do not carry meanings: they evoke them. Their very abstractness and lack of precise content allow a consensus that would otherwise be impossible, among peoples whose materia! circumstances, class interests, and ethnic affiliations are different and often deeply divided. Tonkinson's paper shows vividly how in contemporary Vanuatu kastom is something everyone can share a commitment to because it is vaguely conceived, undefinable, and open to such diverse constructions. The referents of kastom are hierarchical as well as vague, so that kastom can be conceived as dividing or unifying, can be invoked to proclaim unity (at whatever level), or separation. As a symbol, kastom not only hides contradictions but creates them. 299 AUGUST, 19S2 MANKIND Vol. 13 No. 4 The contemporary uses of kastom as ideology are in part a counter to the historic uses of Christianity as invasive ideology. Colonial political hegemony and Christian ideological hegemony have been m u tu ally reinforcing elements of a single system. Christianity (particularly in its evangelical forms) defined what was Melanesian as violent, taboo-ridden, fraught with danger, ignorance and superstition. Yet, in reality, Melancsian cultures institutionalized values of community, mutual obligation, and exchange, kinship obligation, sharing and caring — the very values Jesus proclaimed — much more pervasively than the societies from which the European invaders came. Yet these values, as Tonkinson shows, have been co-opted by Christianity, defined as virtues brought to Melanesia which transformed the old savagery and heathenism and brought love as well as peace. Kastom as ideology, in areas long Christian, has been in part an instrument in a struggle to reclaim and regain the elements of pre-colonial cultures 'captured' by Christianity.1 To the student of political ideology, then, contemporary Melanesian adherence to kastom provides fascinating and valuable case materials. I have suggested that invocations of kastom to unite Melanesians divided by gulfs of language and culture may be possible partly because of a heritage of plantation experience, and the linguistic medium of pidgin, that have built on the underlying commonalities of culture in eastern Melanesia. There is growing evidence that Melanesian Pidgin was historically created largely by speakers of Eastern Oceanic Austronesian languages, who in the nineteenth century labour trade probed beneath their own linguistic diversity to find common underlying grammatical and semantic structures. (The lexicon and many usages were of course derived from English and then-prevailing pidgins.) We know that in Queensland, Solomon Islanders and New Hcbrideans collectively sustained a religious life based on men's houses, shrines and sacrifice — patterns of an ancestral religion, a common ancjent religious heritage (see Codrington 1896). The shared underlying patterns of Oceanic language and culture on which kastom as symbol calls, maintained for decades in the world of plantation experience, hidden from Europeans, may have more substance than we realize. Finally, there is special anüiropologicaf interest in kastom because it is culture itself that serves as symbol. (Anthropologists themselves often spuriously reify and idealize cultures into abstract, coherent systems. That Melanesian ideologues construct an imaginary kastom out of messy realities should perhaps give us some discomfort.) W'h3t are the circumstances under which a people can take a su/licicnt externa! view of themselves and their way of life to see their culture as a 'thing', which they can proclaim adherence to, or reject? Perhaps it is only the circumstances of colonial invasion, where peoples have had to come to terms with their own powerlessness and peripherally, that allow such externalization of culture as symbol. 'Custom' as symbol may idealize and reify the ways of the past, but it can also allow the reconciliation of contradiction — as with the Kwara'ae described by Burt (this volume), who connect their own ancestral genealogies to biblical Israelites and depict their founding ancestor as following Old Testament precepts. The 'custom" ideologically created may, then, be a transformation as well as an idealization of pre-European realities. At the same time, the image of a Kwara'ae ideologue ingeniously reconciling biblical teachings and ancestral precepts, inventing myths and codifying commandments, will serve us well if it reminds us that long before Furopcans arrived in Pacific waters, Melanesian ideologues were at work creating myths, inventing ancestral rules, making up magical spells, and devising rituals They were cumulatively creating ideologies, which sustained male political ascendancy and resolved contradictions by depicting human rules as ancestrally ordained, secret AUGUST, 1982 MANKIND Vol. 13 No. 4 knowledge as sacred, the status quo as eternal. We err, I think, in imagining that spurious kastom is radically different from genuine culture, that the ideologues and ideologies of the post-colonial present had no counterparts in the pre-colonial past. Notes For helpful suggestions on an earlier draft. [ am indebted to Marie Reay and Bob Tonkinson. 1. On (his point, I am indebted to Bob Tonkinson. BlBLIOCRAPltY Codrington, R. M. 1S96. The Melaneuans: Studies in their Anthropology and Folklore. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Keesing. R M. I96S. Chiefs in a Chicfless Society: The Ideolocv of Modern Kwaio Politics Oceania, 38. 278-80. ----------- 1978. Politico-Religious Movements and Anticolonialism on Malaila: Maasina Rule in Historical Perspective. Oceania, 48, 241-61 * 49 46-73. —— 1979. Linguistic Knowledge and Cultural Knowledge: Some Doubts and Speculations American Anthropologist, 81, 14-36. I.AtucY, H. 1979. Maasina Rule: Struggle in the Solomons In A. Mamafc and A. Ali (eds) Race. Class and Rebellion in the South Pacific. George Allen A Unwin. Sydney. 301 2.2. THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC • SPRING/FALL I989 ■political structure und the interests of a regional aristocracy in cementing ilicn- ili)iiiiii.iiitm. Under the Intimer* of Ttiukel and through the Great Council of Chiefs, the chiefly ideology of Fijian custom has been celebrated in and since the coups—used as much to disenfranchise a rising Fijian middle class as to dispossess the Indo-Fijian majority. Ironically, in the name of "Fijian custom" Indians arc being forced to observe Sabbath laws. At the University of the South Pacific and elsewhere, Polynesian scholars and students assert a regional identity based on a pan-Polynesian culture they supposedly share. Some important elements of this culture represent particular regional elaborations within Polynesia, and even misinterpretations by European scholars. In Australia, idealized representations of the pre-Europcan past are used to proclaim Aboriginal identity and the attachment of indigenous peoples to the land, and are being deployed in environmentalist as well as Aboriginal political struggles. In New Zealand, increasingly powerful and succcsslul Maori political movements incorporate idealized and mythi-viml vriMons of a precolonial Golden A^c, the mystical wisdom of Aoteuroa. Hawai'i and New Caledonia exhibit further variants on the themes of Fourth World political struggle, with idealized representations of precolonial society deployed to assert common Identity and to advance and legitimate political demands. In the Hawaiian cusc, a cultural tradition largely destroyed many decades ago must be reconstituted, reclaimed, revived, reinvented. A denial that so much has been destroyed and lost is achieved by political mythology and the sanctification of what survives, however altered its forms. In New Caledonia, the issues are not simply the desperate struggle for political power and freedom from colonial oppression, but also the creation of both common bonds and common cultural identity among peoples whose ancestors were deeply divided, culturally and linguistically, into warring tribes speaking mutually unintelligible languages. SOMK TlUOHI'TICAl Tllt'.MI'.S These discourses of cultural identity in the contemporary Pacific, although they depict the precolonial past and claim to produce countercoio-nialimages, are in many ways derived from Western ideologies. Flint, Giamsci's general argument may be illustrated for the Pacific: » __ I 1 "-•7 m m HB : - K g H H . ■. . KEESING • CREATING THE PAST 2.3 cpuntcrhegemonic discourse pervasively incorporates the structures, cute-v.-;gorleg, and premiic« of hegemonic discourse. In part this !* because those ;}.-: who arc dominated internalize the premises and categories of the domi-V.'nant; in part, because the discourse of domination creates the objective, .^institutional realities within which struggles must be fought; and in part, ^■■because it defines the semiology through which claims to power must be .-.expressed. The Manichcan conceptual structures of missionary discourse ■'-■—dualities of Christian light and heathen darkness, God and the Devil, .".good and evil, white and black—have a continuing impress on Pacific ' "thought, even in countercolonial discourse. /.í Second, contemporary Third World (and Fourth World) representa-;r:tions of their own cultures have been shaped by colonial domination and .■'■ the perception of Western culture through a less direct reactive process, a '/dialectic in which elements of indigenous culture are selected and valor-C ized (at the levels of both ideology and practice) as counters to. or com-' -mentaries on the intrusive and dominant colonial culture. That is, coi-. .-cnized peoples have distanced themselves from (as well as modeling their .;-conceptual structures on) the culture of domination, selecting and shaping ■and celebrating the elements of their own traditions that most strikingly . differentiate them from Europeans (see Thomas n.d.). ',;.,'■• Third, Pacific Island elites, and Aboriginal Australians, Maori, and :'Hawaiian» in fl position to gain leadership roles and become ideologues, We been heavily exposed, through the educational process, to Western "ideologies that idealize primitivity and the wisdom and ecological reverence of those who live close to Nature. Idealizations of the precolonial past in the contemporary Pacific have often been derivatives of Western critiques of modern technology and progress; ironically, those in the -Pacific who in their rhetorical moments espouse these idealized views of the past arc mainly (in their political actions and life-styles) hell-bent on technology, progress, materialism, and "development." /■'■■' In the process of objectification, a culture is (at the level of ideology) .: imagined to consist of "traditional" music, dances, costumes, or artifacts. ■Periodically performing or exhibiting these fctishi/cd representations of .their cultures, the elites of the new Pacific ritually affirm (to themselves, the tourists, the village voters) that the ancestral cultural heritage lives on. Fourth, assertions of identity based on idealizations of the ancestral .past draw heavily on anthropological concepts—particularly ideas about "culture"—as they have entered Western popular thought. It is ironic that ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ 24 THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC • SPRING / FALL I989 cultural nationalist rhetoric often depicts anthropologists as villains who appropriate and exploit, although that anti-anthropological rhetoric-5 is itself squarely shaped by anthropology's concepts and categories. (Doubly ironic, perhaps, that the discourse of cultural nationalism thereby suffers from some of the conceptual diseases—such as essentialism and reificarion of abstractions like 'Vulture" und "society" into entities und causa! Agents — ílmi plague anthropology.) Thruugh such spurious rclflcution and objcctilication, mciouymically, material objects or dances can serve to represent the whole of "a culture." European scholars are implicated in a more direct way in some of the misrepresentations o! ancestral culture*. Some of the classic accounts mid generalizations about the cultures of Polynesia and Melanesia by expatriate scholars—to which Islanders have been exposed through books and other media—are misleading. Western scholars' own misrenderings and stereotypes have fed back into contemporary (mis)representations of the Pacific past. !n questioning the political myths of our time, I am not defending the authority of anthropological representations of the Pacific past, or the hegemonic position of scholarly discourse in relation to the aspirations of indigenous peoples to recapture their own pasts. The past (as I have recently written in relation to colonial history) is contested ground. I am i'iH'i'H thai in iimiriiiiiH i!, I'ucifk Ishiiulers be more relentlessly radical and skeptical—not that they relinquish it to the "experts." (Wc who cluim expertise, too, can well reflect on the politics and epistemology of our privileged authority.) finally (and critically), if I seem to imply n gulf between the authenticity of actual prccolomal societies and cultures and the inauthenticity of the mytliic pasts now being invented in the Pacific, such a characterization in fact perpetuates some of anthropology's own myths. The present political contexts in which talk of custom and ancestral ways goes on are of course very different from prccoionia! contexts. Nonetheless, such mystification is inherent in political processes, in all times and places. Spurious pasts and false histories were being promulgated in the Pacific long before Europeans arrived, as warrior leaders draped veils of legitimacy over acts of conquest, as leaders sought to validate, reinforce, institutionalize, and "celestiaiize" their powers (to borrow a term from Marx), and as factions _ hauled for dominance. Ironically, then, the "true" and "authentic" cul- _ 1 flics ot 1 lie l\uilu pail, overlain itiu! distorted by today's političtí! myths, _ 1 KEESING • CREATING THE PAST 15 '^•.', represent, in part at least, cumulations of the political myths of the ances->;;'-;'"..-tors. ■ J-,;;-. In. Pacific communities on the eve of European invasion, there were ŕ- -> multiple "realities"—for commoners and for chiefs, for men and for ?^:iwomen, for young and for old, for free persons and for captives or slaves, r&<{Q%MfíQn and for vanquished, (iciieabjih'», coüinolotjipi, ritual* wrrr í^vtíierílselves contested spheres. The "authentic" past was never n simple, y~':'.. Unambiguous reality. The social worlds of the Pacific prior to European -rV:.invasion were, like the worlds of the present, multifaceted and complex. ':,<-\y,,Moreover, however the past may be constructed as a symbol, and how-; ever critical it may be for historically dominated peoples to recapture this Z-- ground, a people's cultural heritage poses a challenge to radical qucstion-Ji. ing. We arc all to some degree prisoners of "real" pasts as they survive into ■'" ;;;. the present—in the form of patriarchal values and institutions, of patterns s>;; of thought, of structures of power. A deeply radical discourse (one that /.';.■ questions basic assumptions) would aspire to liberate us from pasts, both -i.- those of our ancestors and those of (colonial or other) domination, as well y. as to use them as political symbols. y■':■;■ :Let me develop these arguments. . "A Series of Negations" ■:;.:Gramscl, writing of the classic situation of class struggle in Europe, wrote .in the Prison Notebooks (1971) that "The lower classes, historically on the /'defensive, can only achieve self-awareness via a series of negations, via .-'■their consciousness of the identity and class limits of their enemy." '■'.'iOwmsci used the term hegemony to characterize the ideological domina-' :tíon whereby the consciousness of subordinate elements in society is .... shaped and structured by the discourse of those who dominate them. My :* colleague Ranajit Guha, arguing for a "subaltern" historiography of colo-• nia! India (1983), has argued that the same hegemonic process of negation operates in colonial situations: the dominated reproduce the conceptual . and institutional structures of their domination, even in struggling against it. In several forthcoming papers, I have advanced similar arguments with :. regard to colonial experience in the Pacific (Keesing n.d.a, n.d.b, n.d.c). -.:; This process operates in many ways, in the ideologies and movements /proclaiming cultural identity und rcappropri.uiug, and in the procesí ifcfflshionliij.', the pi'ccolonlnl past, Our U thai ihc itnih—cotiiitrlc.H, prov- XU IHM CONTKMPOKARY PACIVIC > SI'KINii/l'Ai.l. I9H9 .« XÍBSING . CRRATING TM!! PAST 2.7 inccs, islands—whose unity and common cultural heritage is proclaimed may have acquired their reality only through the colonial process itself. What in precolonial times were politically fragmented and culturally and liii|iuisiii'n!ly diver«- communities, divided by warfare find raiding, became administrative units of the colonial state. These units—such as Western Solomons and Malaita provinces (of the Solomon Islands)—have become units locked in struggle for resources and political power in post-colonial states. Some of these units, notably "Papua," have a unity that is an artifact of European diplomacy and imperialist rivalry. Not surprisingly, the rhetoric of unity and solidarity, for such previously nonexistent entities that have acquired reality, is often framed in terms of common cultural identity. Colonies carved out by imperialist powers in the course of their Pacific rivalries have now become nation states, proclaiming national identities. (In other cases, the process of imperialist competition led to amliiial »nu! arbitrary separation*, in relation to precolonial political structures or linguistic mu! cultural boundaries—its with the two Sumoas —rather than artificial unities.) The point is not that the units for which common cultural identity is being claimed do not exist; mtner, it is that they have been given existence mul liiipniiaiiiT through the process of colonial domination. A century ago, "wantoks" were likely to be enemies. But for decades they have been thrown together in plantation labor, providing support and solidarity; nowadays, wantoks substitute for kin in the urban jungle, and constitute electorates. The convenient administrative and economic fictions of the colonial state have become realities. The place of language in the unity of emergent political entities merits mention. In Fiji, a national language (as well as a national culture) was created through the colonial process, out of a regional diversity that prevailed in prc-European times. In other cases (Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu), the Pidgin English created mainly by indigenous participants in iniiifxiü til domination ami exploitation during eras of shipboard und plantation labor has become a vehicle of nationalism, in the Solomons, Pidgin was the principal medium of unity in the countercoionial Maasina Rule movement, but it has been undervalued as a vehicle of national unity (see Kecsing n.d.J). In New Caledonia, the language of the colonists has ol necessity become the language of indigenous unity and political struggle against colonial domination. It is worth noting that Papua New Guinea squired a second lingua franca in Police Motu, and that this has to some extent been a vehicle of Papuan separatism. ttšŠM '■■-■, *"?"?•• irr ■" IÉI§ ■ifri m if! í», '•■/•■ Rather more subtle processes of hegemony, and the logic of "ncga-V dons," operate at a conceptual level. The most striking example is the 'rhetoric of "black is beautiful," which reproduces the categories of racist '. discourse while reversing the valences. Pacific Islanders themselves have in ľľícent years directed racist discourse at one another (Papuans versus ■".Highlanders, Malaitans versus Western Solomon Islanders, Fijians versus i'ndo-Fijians). .-'■: The Manichean structures of missionary discourse internalized by í Pacific Christians, depicting cosmic struggles of Light and Dark, God and Satan, are reproduced in their own discourse, even in their celebrations of .the ancestral past. The same process has occurred in Africa. Leo Kuper ; .wrote that "One of the resistance songs of the African National Congress ,..^. carried as a refrain, the missionary perspective, 'While We Were Still "in Darkness' " (1978, 91). JanMohamed wrote tellingly of the continuing force in postcoloniul thought of a "Manichean allegory," which defines "a t field of diverse yet Interchangeable oppositions between black and while, ;gOod and evil, superiority and inferiority, civilization and savagery, intcili- t gence and emotion, rationality and sensuality, self and other, subject and object, . . , [producing a] transformation of racial difference into moral ■: and metnphynlcttl difference"(i«;Hf>, ioo-ioj.), ':■'. I have suggested that in the contemporary Pacific, representation» of ancestral cultures are redolent with images derived from missionary dis-: course; so too is the rhetoric of development, depicted as a kind of rebirth. As Alain Babadzan has argued, "The world of kastom and the Western world are in opposition. . . . [A] new Manicheism, . . . while reversing the postulates inherited from the missionaries (the struggle of the Light of the Word vs. the Darkness of Paganism), prolongs them in an unexpected way" (1983). The ancestral past, as ideologically represented, may seek in various ways to resolve contradictions between Christian and pagan origins (recall the Kwnra'ac miccstors as wandering Israelites), In Fiji, the kalnu or fltKCStra! ghosts were decades ago rccatcgori/cd as tťtwm (Tougan 'devil' .—cf. Solomon Island Pijin devoldeuol 'ancestral ghost'). The "Fijian custom" now being used to oppress Indo-Fijians is the historical creation of Wcslcyan missionaries6 as well as Bauan chiefs. The hegemonic force of colonialism has left its mark, even among those most anticolonial and fiercely culturally conservative of Pacific Islanders, the Kwaio of the Maiaita interior with whom I have worked for twenty-five years. The Kwaio traditionalists who still sacrifice pigs to the ances- íH IHK CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC • SI'RINC / 1 ALL 198^ tors and exchange she!! valuables refer to themselves as 'itim 'heathen', or wikiti 'wicked'. For them, too, "straightening out the kastom" remains an important goal: Kwaio customary law, codified in emulation of colonial legal statutes and Biblical commandments, would have strong (if mystical) claims to legitimacy. The Kwaio have thus come to conceptualize their culture as a "thing" that can be reduced to writing, codified in law. Moreover, as 1 have suggested elsewhere (Keesing n.d.c), the discourses of resistance against colonial rule on the part of Malaita pagans, during and even piioľ in M.uisiiiii Rule, employed ň semiology of sovereignty—Hugs, emblems, p.uadcs, palisades—cast in imitation of the rituals of empire enacted at prewar Tulagi.7 Tut- Inuicknous as Commentary on the Exogenous Colonized peoples have not only incorporated and internalized conceptualizations and semiology of colonial discourse at the level of thought, ideology, and political praxis, but through a less direct reactive process they have valorized elements of their own cultural traditions—dccontextual-ized or transformed—as symbols of the contrast between those traditions and Western culture." One manifestation of this process is the evocation of an ideology of sharing and communality to distance a "Melanesian way" or a "Pacific way" or "Fijian custom" from the individualism and fragmentation of Western capitalist society. A case in point, discussed by Linnckin (1983), is iliť way umti'inpoiiiiy Hawaiian cultural nationalism celebrities 'uluinu and \hiu, the collectivist unity of the community, and the la'au as a focus of symmetrical exchange (see also Thomas n.d. and Buck 1986). The actual modes of life—as well as the rhetorically celebrated representations ni traditional society—in Pacific commimitici have been pervasively shaped by colonial domination, in many places for well over a Century. As Pacific societies were pacified, exchange and feasting were often elevated as a surrogate for warfare. As Christianity was adopted, precolo-nial institutions and practices were modified, in some places four or five generations ago. The practices that have become the focus of community life may reflect a historical selective process in which what is cast as indigenous is contrasted with what is foreign—thus distancing village communities from the culture of domination. Ironically, as Thomas (n.d.) has pointed out, anthropologists seeking to discover "authentic" cultural tra-_. I 1 CT: KiEStNG • CREATING THE PAST x<) ditions and to filter out exogenous elements are prone to attribute to the "ethnographic present" (their own mythical construction) patterns of life ~'~.derivative of, shaped by, or transformed radically in reaction against, ;v colonial influence. •-"-'-•■ The symbolic themes Pacific Islanders use to assert their unity and iden- ..ttty have also been shaped by struggles against domination, as is most :'--c!early manifest in the pervasive elevation of "land" as a political symbol. While I do not doubt that in prccoloninl times many Pacific peoples had 11 (kžp identification with mu! reverence for their laud, dun identification MX Dccomc radically transformed in the course ol political struggle and histories of conquest and land alienation. In Fiji, contemporary Hawai'i,9 : -New Caledonia, the Solomon Islands, New Zealand, and Aboriginal Australia, land has become a powerful symbol of identity and a site of contestation, An Ideology of attachment 10 and spiritual significance o! the land Could achieve such prominence only in a historical context of invasion and : colonization. Western Visions and Pacific Pasts -The portrayals that idealize the precolonial past not only incorporate conceptual structures and premises of colonial discourse and elevate symbols : as reactions against colonial domination. In many respects, they also incorporate Western conceptions of Otherness, visions of primitivity, and ::■ critiques of modernity, The imagined ancestors with whom the Pacific is ;'.feeing repopulutcd—Wise Ideologists, Mystical Sages, living in harmony ■ with one another, cosmic forces, and the environment—arc in many ways ■ creations of Western imagination. The relationships maintained only ten or twenty years ago by ihr hourgrni ";; íle and urban elites- with native cultures and with the rural milieu in general, , were marked by the interiorization . . . of . . . Western racist discourse. Those who used to mock the backwardness of "savages" in the name of Progress and Civilization are now (verbally) the fiercest defenders of primitiv- '" ity and archaic values. Opposing the values of kastom to those of the West . . . [represents] a "Western criticism of Westernization . . . [which] borrows from the West a number of its patterns, such as missionary Manicheism (the terms of which are inverted), ruralisr and ecologist ideology, and the modern Western ideology of ethnicity. (Babadzan 19S3) mmmmĚĚĚ 3° THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC • SPRING/ťALL I989 . Maori and Aboriginal Australian ideologues are engaged in reconstructing ancestral pasts characterized by Mystical Wisdom, Oneness with the Land, Ecological Reverence, and Social Harmony. Aboriginal Australia, a land of gatherers and hunters, is being retrospectively depicted in the political mythology of our time as pervaded by reverence for Mother Earth. Warfare and violence (including Maori cannibalism) are carefully edited out of these reinvented pasts. Strikingly, what is edited out in no way violated the values of the real ancestors, as observed in the nineteenth century: what is violated are Western values, as represented in both Christian doctrine and idealizations of the Primitive, as foil for critiques of modcrni/ation. I lie«' idcdi/iiHun* (.nuiiicrN to Ideologic« of modcrni/ation—have a character Babadzan (19X3) called "philo-traditionalist." Marshall Berman (198z) depicted it as a "pastoral vision" of a simpler world. This pastoral ideology is built out of elements that are at least partial truths. The small-scale couummitics ;:íjdestruction of cultures as ways of life and thought—are going on in the '^ißei^i; .Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and China and also in the Andean states, ^Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Perhaps it is an essential element in the STprocess. of nation building, where populations are ethnically diverse.12 ?; Most often, fl dominum national population imposes its language ami cul-4|p|r/,itUrAl tradition on minority groups while appearing to value and preserve 33'^1-4'í'lmiriority cultures: they are preserved like specimens in jars. In this pro-y|}Jf4:."''cess, the "cultures" ostensibly valorized in their fetishized forms may be í§c^S>; Hhe 'site of a double violence, !n Ecuador, in festivals where indigenous fíii&Ž:-- JlUUnn culture is "celebrated," Spanish-speaking nifitizo* don. Indian cos-íř|ž|íSí-tum.es, perform Indian dances, and play Indian music—while the Indians whose "cultures" arc being performed are not allowed to participate. What greater alienation than watching those who dominate and rule you perform symbolically central elements of your cultural heritage: selling your culture?13 What makes the Pacific distinctive here is the way, particularly in the ži%í|:;;;' ;Melanesian countries, the specimens in the jars are the cultures those with ^^jľŕ.'l^;.political power have themselves left behind. Members of the Westernized :n&,iž£-^elites are likely to be separated by gulfs of life experience and education from village communities where they have never lived: their ancestral cultures are symbols rather than experienced realities. Bringing the specimens out of the jars on special occasions—cultural festivals, rituals of state—is a denial of alienation at a persona! level, and a denial that cultural traditions are being eroded and destroyed in the village hinterlands. Again Bflbadzan's observations arc illuminating; In this ideological representation kastom is defined as an accumulation of disjointed cultural signs, . . . an assemblage of discontinuous, observable, and thus reproducible material elements (that they should allow reproduction is of particular importance for the policies of "cultural revival"). These signs of primitivity are principally objects ("art" objects, handicrafts or implements), public singing or dancing, music, recitation of myths, or . . . ceremonies. m J§§- riSrüÖT?; zmmmmmgrm. š>a;^sgfei; V^istmSvi^^ f^itr^f/::',:- »si •QO THE CONTEMPORARY PACIFIC ■ SPRING/FALL I989 . These disparate culture items . . . arc reified as symbols of identity after being abstracted in thought from the ceremonial and liturgical contexts where they are (or were) inscribed, after being separated both from their traditional conditions of transmission and from their symbolic and institutional backjjrniiiul. Some official policies inspired by a desire for "cultural rcvittili/ii-nnn" mni endeavor jti cncourdjic (Its . . . reproduction of thcuc identity symbols, whidi arc deemed proof of the vigor of indigenous cultures and of their resistance to Westernization. (Babadzan 1983) By the same logic, the "cultures" so commoditized and packaged can be sold in iniiMstv I have commented elsewhere on the way this commoditi-/atinu shapes 1'aci'ic cultures to fit Western fantasies: Mass tourism and the media have created a new Pacific in which what is left or reconstructed from the ruins of cultural destruction of earlier decades is commoditÍ7ed and packaged as exoticism for the tourists. The Pacific [is] Fantasy Land for Kurope and the United States (and now for Japan) ... to be symbolically constructed—and consumed by a consumcrist society, to serve its pleasures and needs. The commoditization of their cultures has left tens of thousands of Pacific Islanders as aliens in their own lands, reduced to tawdry commercialized representations of their iinceiitoni, historic)! and culture*. Beneath the veneer of fan-i.iiv, ilľÉ lilaiulci» an* pauperized in village hinterland* or themselves ťoinmoď ni/ed as menial employees. Serving the comforts as well as the fantasies of rich tourists, they arc constrained to smile and "be happy," because that is part of their symbolic image. KEESING . CREATING Tilt |»AST 51 m s,--ň ■%iŕ.-;. We uccil only think 0/ tourism in Fiji. There, at least, the elements of culture enacted for tourists represent a version, if an edited and Christianized one (no strangling of widows in the hotel dining rooms), of a past that actually existed. The representations of "Hawaiian culture" for tourists, with hula dances (see Buck 1986), ukuleles, and pineapples, illustrate that where there is a gulf between historical realities and the expectations of tourists, the fantasies will be packaged and sold. Invented Pasts and Anthropology The ohjettification of a way of life, the rcification of the customs of ancestor nun a symbol m which a political stance l,i taken—whether of rejection 01 idcali/aiion—is not new in the Pacific, and is not confined to m -mm 'islanders who have learned the Western concept of "culture." The so-;~CaJled Vailala Madness of the Gulf Division of Papua in 1919, where villagers destroyed cult objects in a wave of iconoclasm, and proclaimed \jheir rejection of the ways of ancestors who had withheld material riches i/lOJD them, is but one example. Other tWiic "cargo cult*" echoed the ; f ) "- fr ,'N ; *-_, ^ H TUK CONTKMI'ORAKY PACIFIC . SľRING/ľAU IgHp Island peoples asserting their identity and their continuity with the past arc led to seek, characterize, and proclaim an "essence" that has endured despite a century or more of change and Westernization. In d dillcicni and older anthropological erudition-—one that lives on In anthropology museums, hence Is represented in the contemporary Pacific —a culture is metonymically represented by its material artifacts. This museological tradition, which has old roots in the nineteenth-century folkloristu of Europe, has fed as well into the discourse on cultural iden tity, as I have noted. From it derives the view that in preserving the mate rial forms and performance genres of a people, one preserves their cul ture.1" In borrowing from anthropological discourse, ideologies of cultural identity in the contemporary Pacific have not only acquired conceptual oversimplifications but have incorporated some empirical distortions and misinterpretations for which anthropologists (und other European schol' lira) are ultliiiiilely responsible. It is not that Aboriginal or Maori activists, or contemporary Samoans or Trobriand Islanders, are uncritical in their acceptance of what anthropologists have written about them. In Aboriginal struggles for land rights, lor example, one of the battles hus been waged against orthodox views, deriving ultimately from RadcJiffe-Brown, of the patriiineality of local territorial groups—views incorporated into federal land rights legislation. The ironies and contradictions of Aboriginal peoples being denied rights they believe are culturally legitimate on grounds that they do not fit an anthropological model have chilling implications for those of us who would claim privileged authority for our "expertise" or owr constructions of the past. 1 here is a further rwist of irony when scholarly interpretations that may be faulty, or at least misleadingly oversimplified or overgcncralizcd, have been incorporated by Pacific Islanders into their conceptions of their own pasts, l.ri me illustrate with the concept of tnntni in Oceanic religion, on which 1 have recently written (Keesing 1984,1985). When I was at the University of the South Pacific in 1984 and spoke on mana, I discovered that Polynesian students and faculty had been articulating an ideology of a common Polynesian cultural heritage and identity in which mana was ccn' ital. Vet, a-. I pointed out, In many languages in Western Polynesia mana is used as a noun only to describe thunder, lightning, or other meteorological phenomena. Where mana is used as a noun to refer to spiritual power, I I Kfiř$JVG ' CRBATING THK I'AST )f ,33 a number of Polynesian languages, it seems to be a secondary usage, ]>";$ common than its usage as a Stative verb ('be effective', 'be potent', 'be ."** Mifta In the sense It has acquired in anthropology seems centrally important only in a few languages of eastern Polynesia, notably Maori md Hawaiian. Douglas Oliver (personal communication) has told me ' í\ar tli the thousands of documents on the early Society Islands he has ^onc through, mana occurs very rarely. Greg Dening (persona! communi-'ration) has told me the same is true for the Marquesas. We must infer, if Vcvook carefully at the early texts, that in many regional variants of Poly-"res.an religion, mana was not a crucial concept—except in the interpretations of anthropologists like Edward Handy (192.7), intent on imputing Philosophies of cosmic dynamism to the Polynesians. Av The Imputation of mystical wisdom to Polynesians (who in the process Wit distinguished from their dark'sklnticd, savage-, cannibal neighbors to ^ths west) has roots In European theories of race. The construction of the * To'ynesians in European thought, a process going back to the early ., explorers, has been brilliantly examined by Bernard Smith (1969). Most * ffrik'ng has been the construction of Maori culture in European iinugiiui-ton, by such scholars as Sir George Grey. The cosmic philosophy of the Maori, the mystical worldview, is as much a European as a Polynesian "Creation." Even though contemporary Maori ideologues attempt to discredit some aspects of the representation of Maori culture by Western scholars, the counterrepresentation advanced as authentic seems deeply .moused by early Western romanticizations of the Maori (as well as contemporary Western pastoral myths of primitivity). Political Mythology and Cultural "Authenticity": A W'Der View % for» I have implied that there is a wide gull between the authentic past •+-the real ways of life that prevailed in the Pacific on the eve of European invasion—and the representations of the past in contemporary ideologies o'cultural identity. This gulf requires a closer look. I do not at this staue intend to imply that prc-F.uropcan Pacific peoples Veit mystical sages, holistic healers, or wise ccologists. The gulf to which í hi\e pointed is real and important. My point is rather that the real past was itself highly political. Pacific societies, in pre-European times, were y< life CONTEMPORARY I ■ac-,«c • S,''UNG/ťAL«íg^^^CmtlNG THH PAST far from stable and st.itic (functionalist models notwithstandi were, as the archaeological record makes very clear, marked have arP„P,f / c S accumulation of countless "polyb*f ř^:^^?Sf^^^V*,1tu,cnavc bccn complicic in legitimati, them to the gods, und discrediting rüste classes acquiring sufficient political power could bend cultural rules and roles to legitimating their power. (Th chiefly factions produce and th ' >e old Polynesian process whereby asc^^^Š^^ * 3SSÍ^' „l • , '-------w",u impose versions of rhp n,« ,k„ i •_• :^'::^^-v'ý:^-ň^^B> in exoticizine „„ „i • j ..... "'"i", wnc her o ___-,»,uu; representations of the many ways incorporated premises of colonial discourse l,ä) in assigning a "fixity" to Otherness, in typifying, in xicizing. A more radical Pacific discourse with regard not more, faith in scholarly representations of !„ ' "*"" "rc '"" »" ''"'^m fron, the nnlm.-.d......... .., ..../ľ^^^-^^^^J^mopríarionsof Otherness Isceencou i ľ PaSt°ra' ^äf^clflcIslandsiJ" ,WUO' "* wr"' '» *'»'< »«rn. ihr i'it'üfiii lire líni mi tlillvceiit Írom the political inytha of [he pns^.'ßiJfc Itilly recorded by the ciirly ethnographers. Tí :J There are political contexts where it is important for an idealized vfc.;«;' of the past to be used as counter to the present: to the world capitalist system as it incorporates poor Third World countries on its margin?■'g>-S.'-.''■ ni.iry producers and consumers; to mindless materialism, dismtegra(#;/::,v". bonds of kinship and community, narcissistic individualism, destruefö^ of environments for short-term profit. There is a place for pas»,?*.»:? if^clfic Islands scholars ^feŠČ^W . ""Plications an f ŽlSľľľ'"""? í" *•* i«*™ «iif. The fr, unie of cer- ."'-'" ^:' ... ..,r____.„v.wu.i uie ticcpty problem;: .-vŕ-i?^kiyŕft)lJnds .scholarly expertise—like myihic;il history—is !iss t;'4íf!;"■'.! k srems: it dissolves in the right mixture of astute skepticism t^ii^U'^'f^fcP^xivicy. But specialists on the Pacific do not best serve the :^{fr^'Si^Oy-A-less hegemonic scholarshin or K.-- ----- wĚSm HB f -^ JJ f ,ti^ 1 v ; "V ^ r i. » -r ) ■>■ \ " ^ I.S- Nit V rv-i