This is a modern song of the Enga people of New Guinea, about capturing the power-knowledge of Europeans, the ‘Red Men’ in local parlance
When the time comes,
Our youngsters will feed upon their words,
After the Red Men drift away from this land,
Our youngsters, like honey birds,
After the Reds have gone,
Will suck the flowers,
While standing back here.
We will do like them,
We shall feed upon their deeds
Like honey-birds sucking flowers.
(Talyaga 1975:n.p.)
Reversing the real relations of exploitation and domination, these verses could easily be mistaken for the wistful fantasies of the powerless. Yet it would be wrong to suppose them motivated by self-contempt or a sense of their impending doom. Everything about the modern ethnography of Highland New Guinea indicates that the sentiment of cultural usurpation—here so ambiguously figured as honey-birds feeding on the powers of banished White men—is the guiding principle of the Highlanders’ historical action. Rather than despondency, it is a positive action towards modernity, premised on the Enga’s assurance they will be able to harness the good things of Europeans to the development of their own existence. ‘Develop-man’ is the neo-Melanesian term for ‘development,’ but it would not be wrong to re-pidginise it back to English as ‘the development of man’, since the project to which it refers is the use of foreign wealth in the expansion of feasting, politicking, subsidising kinship and other activities that make up the local conception of a human existence. These are the activities that the working and warrior youth of the Enga are being urged to undertake. Rather than the death of tradition, the Enga thus express their confidence in a living tradition, a tradition that serves as a means and measure of innovation.
In anthropological terms, which is to say perceiving great things in little ones, this active appropriation by the Enga of the European power imposed upon them, is a local manifestation of a new planetary organisation of culture. Unified by the expansion of Western capitalism over recent centuries, the world is also being re-diversified by indigenous adaptations to the global juggernaut. In some measure, global homogeneity and local differentiation have developed together, the latter as a response to the former, in the name of native cultural autonomy. The new planetary organisation has thus been described as a ‘Culture of cultures,’ a world cultural system made up of diverse forms of life. As Ulf Hannerz put it: ‘There is now a world culture, but we had better make sure we understand what this means. It is marked by an organisation of diversity rather than a replication of uniformity’ (1990:237). Thus one complement of the new global ecumenicism is the so-called culturalism of very recent decades: the self-consciousness of ‘culture’ as a value to be lived and defended, that has broken out all around the Third and Fourth worlds. Ojibway, Hawaiians, Inuit, Tibetans, Amazonian peoples, Australian Aborigines, Maori people, Senegalese: everyone now speaks of their ‘culture,’ or some local equivalent, precisely in the context of national or international threats to the existence to that culture. This does not mean a simple and nostalgic desire for tiki ornaments and war clubs, or some such fetishised repositories of a pristine identity. Such a ‘naive attempt to hold peoples hostage to their own histories,’ as one anthropologist has said, would thereby deprive them of history (Turner 1987:7). What the self-consciousness of ‘culture’ does signify, is the demand of different peoples for their own space within the world cultural order. The focus of the Enga song above is not so much a refusal of the commodities and relations of the world system, but rather a desire to indigenise them. The project is the indigenisation of modernity.