The struggle of non-Western peoples to create their own cultural versions of modernity undermines the received Western dichotomy of tradition and change, custom and rationality—and most notably its twentieth century version of tradition and development. This tradition-change antithesis was already old by the time the philosophers of the Enlightenment took on the project of destroying entrenched superstition by progressive reason. It had been kicking around advanced European thought at least since Sir Francis Bacon proposed to smash the idols of the cave and the tribe by the exercise of rational-empirical wisdom—and thus rescue humanity from the metaphysical consequences of Original Sin. Modern versions of the same ideological hang-up notably include the theories of development economists in which, as we have seen, so-called tradition, supposedly burdened with irrationalities, appears as an obstacle to so-called development.

Paradoxically, almost all the cultures described as ‘traditional’ by anthropologists, were in fact neotraditional, already changed by Western expansion. In some cases this happened so long ago that no-one, not even anthropologists, now debate their cultural authenticity. The Iroquois confederacy was by all accounts a post-contact develop-man, as were the Plains Indian cultures that flourished through the acquisition of the horse. For all that, were the Iroquois less Iroquoian or the Sioux less Souian? And nowadays, are not the Maori people Maori, the Fijians, Fijian? In Fiji today, Wesleyan Christianity is considered the ‘custom of the land’. Margaret Jolly rightly wonders why church hymns and the Christian mass should not be considered ‘part of Pacific tradition’, given that they ‘have been significantly remade by Pacific peoples, so that Christianity may appear today as more quintessentially a Pacific than a Western faith’. If Pacific peoples gloss over the distinction—so critical to the Western sensibility—between the colonial and the precolonial past, it is that they ‘are more accepting of both indigenous and exogenous elements as constituting their culture’ (Jolly 1992:53). Faced with this hybrid state of affairs, we might be advised to return to the indigenous daily routine of the average American man described some decades ago by Ralph Linton.

In Europe and the Peoples without History, Eric Wolf correctly pointed out that most of the world was a mix of the indigenous and the exogenous by the time Western anthropologists arrived. Imperialism had arrived first. Regrettably, in his effort to convince fellow-anthropologists that they had never really known the pristine peoples they hankered after, Wolf neglected to draw the complementary conclusion concerning the cultural differences the ethnographers had nonetheless discovered and described. If the indigenous peoples were not without history, it was because they were not without their culture—which is also why their modern histories have differed.

In the late 18th century, the Hawaiian chiefs largely monopolised trade with the British and American vessels stopping for provisions and sandalwood while en route to China with furs from Northwest America. The chiefs, however, had distinctive economic demands, mainly for unique adornments and domestic furnishings, flashy goods that linked their persons to the sky and overseas sources of divine power, fashionable goods that could also differentiate them from their aristocratic fellows and rivals. Their Kwakiutl counterparts on the Northwest Coast were beginning a long economic history of a contrasting kind, demanding standardised items from the fur traders by the tens of thousands, items which eventually became Hudson’s Bay blankets. Moreover, rather than hoarding their treasures as Hawaiian chiefs did, the Kwakiutl distributed their blankets (in potlatches) in ways that allowed them to correlate and measure their otherwise distinct claims to superiority. In contrast to the rather mundane woollen blankets that Kwakiutl demanded, Honolulu traders of Boston firms sent to America for de luxe articles: ‘Everything new and elegant will sell at a good profit. Coarse articles are of no use.’ The letter books of these traders are full of orders for fine calicoes, silks, shawls, and scarves ‘in handsome patterns’, superfine broadcloths and cashmeres; a whole catalogue of Polynesian splendours in a European idiom—commodities, moreover, from which most people were excluded. Unlike the Kwakiutl chiefs who were fashioning their pre-eminence out of common cloth, the Hawaiian élite were bent on unique projects of economic aggrandisement. But then, the Hawaiian chiefs were all more or less closely descended from the gods, and the main issue between them was how to turn these quantitative differences of genealogy into qualitative distinctions of standing. By contrast, the Kwakiutl chiefs already represented distinct and unrelated lineages, with different divine origins and powers. As heirs of unique ancestors and treasures, they used stock European goods in public fashion to make comparative representations of their worth, to turn their qualitative differences in genealogy into quantitative measures of rank. Accordingly the politics, economics and destinies of the Hawaiians and the Kwakiutl acquired different forms and fates in the nineteenth century. Their respective cultural traditions survived in the different ways they changed. Tradition is not the opposite of change.