Creating the Past: Custom and Identity in the Contemporary Pacific

Abstract

Across the Pacific, from Hawai'i to New Zealand, in New Caledonia, Aboriginal Australia, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea, Pacific peoples are creating pasts, myths of ancestral ways of life that serve as powerful political symbols.In the rhetoric of postcolonial nationalism (and sometimes separatism) and the struggles of indigenous Fourth World peoples, now minorities in their own homelands, visions of the past are being created and evoked.Scholars of Pacific cultures and history who are sympathetic to these political struggles and quests for identity are in a curious and contradiction-ridden position in relation to these emerging ideologies of the past.The ancestral ways of life being evoked rhetorically may bear little relation to those documented historically, recorded ethnographically, and reconstructed archaeologically-yet their symbolic power and political force are undeniable.Perhaps it does not matter whether the pasts being recreated and .invokedare mythical or "real," in the sense of representing closely what actual people did in actual times and places.Political symbols radically condense and simplify "reality," and are to some extent devoid of content: that is how and why they work.Perhaps it matters only whether such political ideologies are used for just causes, whether they are instruments of liberation or of oppression.In the contemporary Pacific they are being used both to recapture just rights and to deny them.The question is less simple than that.The process of recapturing the past, of reconstructing, of questioning Western scholarship-historical and anthropological-is important and essential.My intention is neither to defend established versions of the past from a standpoint of vested scholarly interest, nor to debunk emerging The Contemporary Pacific, Volume 1, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring & Fall, 1989, 19-42

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