ON THE THEORY AND POLITICS OF CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION IN THE PACIFIC

Abstract

The premise that culture is symbolically constructed or ' invented' has become a hallmark of social-science scholarship in the postmodern era. Cultural invention is part of the intellectual Zeitgeist of the 1980s and 1990s although not all of its invocations can be categorized as * postmodernist'. In the early 1980s anthropologists working independently in a number of Pacific Islands societies began to view 'culture' alternately, 'tradition' oxkastom as a symbolic construction, a contemporary human product rather than a passively inheritedlegacy (see Babadzan 1988; Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Linnekin 1983).1 The impetus for this shift in perspective did not originate in Pacific anthropology, but can be traced to a more general dissatisfaction in the social sciences with positivist and objectivist approaches to culture and related concepts in Western scholarship. The more or less simultaneous appearance of these Pacific case studies, Anderson's (1983) Imagined Communities, and the Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) volume Tlie Invention of Tradition demonstrates a striking cross-disciplinary convergence in a line of inquiry, albeit not as I elaborate below the emergence of a unified theory. This paper examines the theoretical notion of cultural construction in the light of the perceived political dilemmas associated with its application, in this case, to Pacific Islands societies. The essay's primary aims are twofold: to clarify and situate this concept theoretically, and to address the pragmatic aspects of cultural construction as a discursive mode in and about Pacific societies. I begin by emphasizing that the study of cultural invention in the Pacific has affinities with analogous projects not only in anthropology but in other disciplines. Placing this rubric in the broader context of current social-science theory and applications may explain why the exploration of cultural construction has become a theoretical imperative for many anthropologists. For all the perceived theoretical sophistication of this new approach, however, talking about the invention of culture in any specific social context is fraught with practical, political, and ethical problems. One wonders how Scottish nationalists, for example, may have reacted to Hugh Trevor-Roper's (1983) demolition of the vaunted 'Highland Tradition' as a set of 'fabrications'. A number of Pacific anthropologists have expressed concern about the way cultural construction 'plays' outside the academy. Particularly at issue is how this arguably rather abstruse academic argument may be represented in the politicized contexts of Pacific Island nations and colonies. The misgivings have recently been publicly articulated in reference to Allan Hanson' s (1989) article demonstrating that certain key tropes in Maori oral tradition were authored by European scholars.2 Hanson' s piece provoked angry reactions on the part of some Maori and Pakeha scholars in New Zealand (see Wilford 1990). The tenor of these responses points to a fundamental problem: that ' invention' is itself an inflammatory word, inescapably implying something fictitious, ' made up' and therefore not real (cf . Hanson 1991:450).