Abstract
Marshall Sahlins has much to say about the capacity of local Pacific cultures to seize the opportunities and wealth provided by the global system. He reflects on the process of ‘enlightenment’ with the notion of a progressive series of evolutionary stages, beginning in ‘savagery’ and culminating in ‘civilisation’, into which should be fitted and fixed the various non-Western peoples. He goes on to examine ‘what has not been too enlightening’– a loss of culture.
Sahlins’ proposes the ‘indigenisation of modernity’. Citing a modern song of the Enga people of New Guinea, he continues by stating that cultural traditions survive in different ways over time: tradition is not the opposite of change. He examines the corollary of the relationship between money and markets, moralities and mentalities before considering the reversing role of centres and peripheries.
He concludes by stating his interest in the ongoing creation of new forms of culture in the modern world.
Table of Contents
In the late 18th century, at the height of the European Enlightenment, the French philosophers invented the word ‘civilisation’ to refer to their own society—a usage that was quickly adopted in Britain. Among the other not too enlightening ideas that logically followed was the notion of a progressive series of evolutionary stages, beginning in ‘savagery’ and culminating in ‘civilisation,’ into which one could fit—and fix—the various non-Western peoples. The imperialism of the last two centuries has not reduced such enlightened contrasts between the West and the Rest. On the contrary the ideologies of ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’ that trailed in the wake of Western domination took their basic premises from the same philosophical regime. Even the critical arguments of the Left about indigenous ‘dependency’ and capitalist ‘hegemony’ could result in equally dim views of the historical capacities of non-Western peoples. As though these peoples had nothing to do with history, except to suffer from it.
In too many narratives of Western domination, the indigenous peoples appear merely as victims—neo-historyless peoples whose own agency disappeared more or less with their culture, the moment Europeans erupted on the scene. Indeed, as Margaret Jolly has pointed out, when Europeans change it is called ‘progress’, but when ‘they’ (the others) change, notably when they adopt some of our progressive attributes, it is a loss of their culture, some kind of adulteration. As the European folklore goes, before we came upon the inhabitants of the Americas, Asia, Australia or the Pacific islands, they were ‘pristine’ and ‘aboriginal’. It is as if they had no historical relations with other societies, were never forced to adapt their existence. Rather, until Europeans appeared, they were ‘isolated’—which just means that we were not there. They were ‘remote’ and ‘unknown’—which means they were far from us, and we were unaware of them. Hence the history of these societies only began when Europeans appeared—an epiphanal moment, qualitatively different from anything that had gone before, and culturally devastating. The historical difference with everything pre-colonial was power. Exposed and subjected to Western domination, the less powerful peoples were destined to lose their cultural coherence, as well as the pristine innocence for which Europeans—incomplete and sinful progeny of Adam—so desired them.
Accordingly, one of the main academic consequences of the violence inflicted by the West was the ‘despondency theory’ that became popular in a variety of twentieth century literature relating to colonised peoples. Despondency theory was the logical precursor to dependency theory. But as it turned out—when the surviving victims of imperialism began to seize their own modern history—despondency was another not terribly enlightening idea of the power of Western ‘civilisation’. Here is a good example from A.L. Kroeber’s great 1948 textbook, Anthropology.
With primitive tribes, the shock of culture contact is often sudden and severe. Their hunting lands or pastures may be taken away or broken under the plough, their immemorial customs of blood revenge, head-hunting, sacrifice, marriage by purchase or polygamy be suppressed, perhaps their holy places profaned or deliberately overthrown. Resistance is crushed by firearms. Despondency settles over the tribes. Under the blocking-out of all old established ideals, without provision for new values and opportunities to take their place, the resulting universal hopelessness will weigh doubly heavy because it seems to reaffirm inescapable frustration in personal life also (1948:438–39).
A corollary of despondency theory was that the others would now become just like us—if they survived. The Enlightenment had already prepared for this eventuality by insisting on the universality of human reason and progress: a course of development that would be good—in all senses of the term—for the human species as a whole. In his Primitive Culture of 1871, E.B. Tylor showed the doom that awaited appreciation of cultural diversity by these theories of unilineal evolution, by endorsing—as an appropriate procedure for classifying societies in evolutionary stages—the immortal observation of Dr. Johnson that ‘one set of savages is just like another.’ A late classic of the genre was Walt Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth (1957), with its unilinear sequence of five developmental stages from ‘traditional societies’ to ‘the age of high mass consumption.’ (Rostow must have been among the first to perceive that the culmination of human social evolution was shopping.) Explicitly argued as an alternative to Marxist stages of progress, Rostow’s thesis appeared as a mirror image, with the added advantage of turning left into right twice over. Common to many theories of development was a cheerful sense of cultural tragedy: the necessary disintegration of traditional societies that functioned, in Rostow’s scheme, as a precondition for ‘economic take-off’. Foreign domination was needed to accomplish this salutary destruction, since otherwise the customary relations of traditional production would set a ceiling on economic growth. By its own providential history, Europe had been able to develop itself, but according to Rostow, other peoples would have to be shocked out of their backwardness by an intrusive alien force. No revolutionary himself, Rostow could agree with Marx that in order to make an omelette one must first crack the eggs. Interestingly many peoples now explicitly engaged in defending their culture against national and international domination—the Maya of Guatemala and the Tukanoans of Colombia, for example (Warren 1992; Watanabe 1995; Jackson 1995)—have distanced themselves both from the bourgeois Right and the proletarian Left, refusing the assimilation pressures that would sacrifice their ethnicity to either the construction of the nation or the struggle against capitalist imperialism. Contrary to the evolutionary destiny the West had foreseen for them, the so-called savages will neither be all alike nor just like us.
In this vein, and as the century wears on, Max Weber’s comparative project concerning the possibilities for capitalist development afforded by different religious ideologies seems increasingly bizarre. Not that it is by any means bizarre to talk of the cosmological organisation of pragmatic action. What seems increasingly weird is the way Weberians became fixated on the question of why one society or another failed to achieve this summum bonum of human history: capitalism. One American Sinologist said China during the Qing dynasty had come so very close. It is like asking why the New Guinea Highlanders failed to develop the spectacular potlach of the Kwakiutl people. A question the Kwakiutl social scientist might well ask, given how so close the New Guineans had come with their elaborate pig exchange ceremonies. Likewise the Christian missionaries’ question of how Fijians in their natural state failed to recognise the true god. One might as well ask why European Christians did not develop the ritual cannibalism of Fijians. After all, they came so close.
What is perhaps more interesting, as it actually happened, is how Christianity was Fijianised. Local societies everywhere have attempted to organise the irresistible forces of the Western World System by something even more inclusive—their own system of the world, their own culture.