Table of Contents
Throughout the South Pacific, as in many other places, notions of ‘culture’ and ‘development’ are very much alive, surfacing again and again in a wide variety of contexts—political debate, the news media, sermons and policy reports, as well as in the endless discourses of ‘ordinary life’, everywhere from outlying villages to gatherings of urban élites. Not infrequently the terms are counterposed, and development, along with ‘economic rationality’, ‘good governance’ and ‘progress’ is set against culture or ‘custom’, ‘tradition’ and ‘identity’. The decay of custom and impoverishment of culture are often seen as wrought by development, while failures of development are haunted by the notion that they are due, somehow, to the darker, irrational influences of culture. Nevertheless, as Ron Crocombe has commented (1994:38), both are ‘good’ words throughout the Pacific, needing, and receiving, constant attention. The problem, as in other places, has been to resolve the contradictions between them so as to achieve the even greater good—access to material goods, welfare and the amenities of ‘modern life’ without the sacrifice of ‘traditional’ values and institutions that provide material security and sustain diverse social identities.
Many development economists are aware of these contradictions. The World Bank (1991:1–3) for example, acknowledges that ‘[p]rospects for economic development [in the Pacific] are conditioned to a large extent by the islands’ social patterns’, and that ‘cultural endowments’ exert a ‘profound influence over the pattern…of development.’ Wolfgang Kaspar (1991:49) makes the point that ‘anthropological [by which he means cultural] facts matter in the South Pacific.’ He gives a good account of them, but then, like the writers of the World Bank Report, he has not really sought to work out exactly how they matter, or what their implications may be for economic development. Nevertheless, he confidently reaches the general conclusion that South Pacific island countries could, if they really tried, emulate the growth of certain Asian economies, ‘absorbing Western technology, management and economic modes of behaviour without giving up their Chinese, Malay, Korean, Japanese or Indian identities’ (1991:790).
Development economists frequently draw comparisons between Asian and Pacific countries in much the same terms that Kaspar does (for example Cole and Tambunlertchai 1993), perhaps on the assumption that since they all belong in one Asia Pacific region, what goes for culture in the larger Asian part of it, goes for the remainder. This, I believe, is a false assumption, and one that I sought to question directly in my own contribution at the Suva meeting, by pointing out some of the less obvious ways that Pacific island countries are different, apart from scale and resources.
In general, what is construed as culture in the Pacific region is constructed in ways that are quite distinct from the kinds of construction prevalent in the larger Asian countries. Culture impinges on the ‘harder’ structures of political and economic organisation much more directly and effectively. There is, in every Pacific country, a large and vigorous traditional sector. It does not consist, as is the case in many other regions, of minorities or a few remnant groups in the hills with little influence on national economic and political affairs. In most cases, around 80 to 90 per cent of land resources are under customary tenure, and the traditional sector accounts for around 50 per cent of national GDP. Furthermore, the systems of customary tenure are commonly entrenched in constitutional or other legal structures which insulate them, either absolutely or in large degree, from the operation of market forces and state coercion. Custom thus controls a very large proportion of the economic resources that are basic for development in any of its conventional senses. In these circumstances development is not, as some would have it, simply a matter of engineering a transition from subsistence to dynamic monetary economies. The economic mode of Pacific traditional sectors is not ‘subsistence’ if by that is meant ‘mere subsistence’—nor has it ever been. There is instead a wide variety of reciprocal exchanges and redistributions that integrate whole districts in networks of mutual obligation and concern going far beyond ‘mere subsistence’. Such transactions are more than ‘mere economics’. They are, in the well-worn phrase, ‘embedded in the society’, carrying within them a large moral and ideological force.
Culture also impinges on national politics. Pacific countries are democratic; most are wholly so, and the remainder at least to some degree. Politicians have to be elected, and where the electors derive a great proportion of their livelihoods from the traditional sectors, matters of custom and tradition carry considerable political clout. Again, most Pacific countries have constitutions which assert national legitimacy in terms of their distinctive culture and traditions, and these are given at least as much attention as universal notions of democracy and individual rights. In these ways, culture in one form or another is right at the heart of national economic and political life.
These basic facts clearly distinguish the region from the larger Asia Pacific conglomerate in which it is so often submerged. Culture plays a much more significant role in national economies and national life of Pacific countries than it does in most other regions of the world. One of the implications is that the national economies of the Pacific cannot be adequately encompassed by standard macroeconomic analyses. Economists do what they usefully can in charting the trends and fortunes of the private and public sectors, but they generally have little or nothing to say about what they call the traditional sector. This is understandable, given the nature of traditional economic transactions and their absence from national accounting systems. But where the traditional sector accounts for 50 per cent or more of GDP (according to what can only be gross estimates), such analyses can hardly be adequate as descriptions of what motivates people or what they are actually doing with their lives. In addition, since macroeconomic analyses commonly take little or no account of the constraints that the ideology of tradition places on the private and public sectors, recommendations for development take on an air of prescriptive unreality. Politicians and policymakers in Pacific countries do what they can to adapt the development recommendations to social and political realities (or, as some would insist, to their own ends), but it is often an inexact and disruptive process, beset by many unintended consequences.
There is, it seems, no widely agreed-upon way out of this situation—no general paradigm for economic development that does not, in the final analysis, involve getting people out of what is consistently called the subsistence economy and into a dynamic monetary economy. That, so they say, is an economic imperative. Be that as it may, it hardly contributes to an understanding of the contemporary economic, social and cultural reality in Pacific island countries. For that, the need is for a broader and more complex conceptualisation, made in socioeconomic rather than straightforward economic categories. A scheme that I have proposed involves three broad domains: a traditional domain, a private sector domain and a public sector domain. These are not simply sectors of economic activity but socioeconomic units, each with its own economic base, its own set of institutional structures and basic grounding ideas. They are present in every Pacific country, though differently constituted in each, according to the contingent historical and cultural structures which brought them into being. They have been there for generations, having been laid one over the other in the form of a palimpsest, each influencing what was there before and, in turn, acquiring a particular coloration of its own from what preceded it. Individuals may participate in several domains, as when a business person contributes profits to a traditional undertaking, or when traditional status is converted to political ends. Institutions, motivations and expectations may differ between separate domains. People know this, and can either keep them apart, or deliberately confuse them. The structure of domains may change, adapting to connections which are made with the outside world (as, for example, through emigration) and in this way influence the structure of other domains.
These chapters, in their diverse ways, pick up and elaborate on this general characterisation. They also cohere remarkably with one another in the following four ways. First, none of the contributors is at any pains to define either culture or development. They are instead concerned with the ways in which the terms are employed in common usage, with ‘what is being accomplished socially, politically, discursively when the [concepts…are] used to describe, analyse, argue, justify and theorise’ (Dominguez 1992:21). They are also very closely focused particularities, drawing on a variety of concrete examples and images: a two-storey house, Solbrew, centre and edge, a village band and so forth. Change is expected. Consistency is not an issue. What is characterised as culture appears sometimes as a weapon of the weak, sometimes as oppression by the strong. This produced no confusion, no dislocating sense of a ragbag of unrelated topics. Everyone present knew precisely what was at issue, drawing on a common fund of experience or what Dominguez has characterised as ‘sameness and shared understanding’. This, I believe, is an important point which has clear implications for any plans for future action on behalf of culture in the Pacific.
Second, although the chapters show a common concern with what is understood as culture, there is no idealisation of it. That in itself is an accomplishment, since in the general Pacific discourse of ‘culture and development’ idealisation is pervasive—its nature neatly captured by Colin Filer’s description of ‘the village which is everywhere and nowhere’,
…a community whose members lived in complete harmony with each other and with their natural environment, who jointly owned the land to which they had a mystical attachment, who chose their leaders by consensus, settled arguments by compromise, and redistributed the products of their labour to ensure that everyone enjoyed the same condition of subsistence affluence (1990:9).
Contributors to the conference were in general experienced enough to know that no traditional community exists entirely free from greed, self-seeking, treachery and disloyalty. The common regret that all the chapters express is simply the erosion of the traditional institutional forces that hold these forces in check, by the ideologies of development which are built on notions of cost accounting and bourgeois individualism. Pacific countries are all relatively small; social disruptions are not easily contained and can have very widespread and corrosive effects.
Third, it is obvious that traditional values and forms of social organisation have been remarkably resilient and persistent throughout the Pacific. Marshall Sahlins’ chapter is the most powerful and eloquent statement of this point, drawing attention to the capacity of peoples to indigenise the forces of global modernity and turn them to their own ends. In the Pacific, this capacity depends not only on force of will, loyalty to kin, religion or respect for chiefs (though all these are important) but also upon a solid, and legally entrenched, economic infrastructure.
As a region of striking human diversity, the Pacific has attracted anthropologists ever since the halting beginnings of the subject as a separate field of social inquiry. Over the years, the anthropologists have produced a huge descriptive record of the region, couched in a wide variety of theoretical frameworks and including some of the classics of the discipline. ‘Oceania’ was thus built into a famous site of culture, with the descriptive record contributing significantly to the acceptance of culture in the anthropological sense, as an attribute of all peoples. This was in opposition to the restrictive German and French kultur/culture, ‘high culture’, or the possession of a privileged few, and also to the related notion of the equal worth of all cultural traditions which has passed into popular usage as vulgar cultural relativity.
Anthropologists established and retained what Linnekin (1992:255) has called ‘narrative authority’, if only because they were, for much of the time, the only ones to pay attention to ‘culture’ as such. The reaction of Pacific peoples themselves to these largely objectivist, positivist (Linnekin 1992:249) representations was highly varied—though, for complex and particular historical reasons, often muted. The situation was to change, however, as indigenous scholars and political leaders sought to construct their own versions of culture and tradition, as kastom, pasim tumbuna, Maoritanga, fa’a Samoa, vaka vanua and so forth, asserting their own narrative authority and defining for themselves the essential qualities by which they wished to be known to the outside world. None of these changes, of course, were peculiar to the Pacific. They were worldwide. The meaning of culture went through another historical transformation, becoming a self-conscious, objectified reality, a universally valorised marker of difference which could be used to good effect in struggles against colonial and other political oppressions and which directly reflected the ways in which multiculturalism in the industrial world used culture to refer to diverse collective social identities engaged in struggles for social equality. The background to this historical transformation of the meaning of culture is complex. Jocelyn Linnekin (1992:254) refers its intellectual genealogy to various postmodernists, while Terence Turner (1993:424) points to a great ‘contemporary conjuncture’ of the global organisation of capitalism, the suppression of the nation state and other changes such as consumerism and information technology.
Not unexpectedly, these moves led to a general excitation of the academic discourse on the region, with the result that there was a proliferation of the scholarly attention given to the general themes of tradition, nationalism and identity, often summarised under the label of the politics of tradition. This has provided fertile ground for continuing debates—impossible to summarise here, but whose leading ideas are well represented in a number of volumes of collected essays (Keesing and Tonkinson 1982; Linnekin and Poyer 1990; Jolly and Thomas 1992; Lindstrom and White 1993). Jolly and Thomas give a good summary of the issues that this literature addresses, several of which are relevant to an informed reading of this volume. The historically particular influences of colonialism, for example, have channelled broadly similar indigenous institutions in different ways. Thus there is a world of difference between what happened to ‘chieftainship’ in the Cook Islands under the New Zealand regime, and the way in which the British administration coopted chiefs into the mechanism of indirect rule in Fiji, as well as broad similarities in the fate of indigenous people in the white settler colonies of New Zealand, Hawaii and Australia. The nature of the indigenous societies was also relevant. There is an obvious difference in the way that culture has come to be constructed in more linguistically and politically unitary places like Fiji, Samoa and Tonga compared to the more diverse territories of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. What has come to be objectified and counted as culture (as distinct from ‘church’, ‘business’ or ‘government’) is thus extremely diverse.
Then there is the issue of authenticity, centred on the question of the extent to which representations of the past in indigenous constructions of tradition square, with ‘historical facts’—the occasion of some notable disputes between Pacific peoples and academics. These have probably attracted much more attention in academic circles than among indigenous intellectuals and activists, most of whom have been preoccupied with more urgent, practical, political and legal concerns. A related issue here has been the extent to which all traditions, including the great European ones, have been ideologically constructed—a point neatly raised by Sahlins in his characterisation of the European Renaissance (1993:7–8).
Both of these issues are related to a third: the extent to which ideas of ‘national culture’ can be manipulated to serve the interests of westernised élites in control of the apparatus of government. This can give rise to accusations, justified or not, about ‘politicians raised in urban settings and educated overseas [who] proclaim the virtues of a kastom they have never known’ (Keesing 1982:299). In some places it can also give rise to the deeper, more complex and subtle ambiguities which appear when the culture that is extolled is no more than an analogue of ‘high culture’ in the Western sense, the attribute and possession of a privileged few. The well-known debate over ‘The Pacific Way’ illustrates aspects of this.
A hundred and fifty or so years ago, when people of the Tokelau atolls began to have access to iron, European cordage and nautical goods, they set about acquiring it by whatever means available. They discarded their shell fishhooks and made their own out of iron, replaced their sennit lines with manufactured ones and their matting sails with canvas. They learned of pulaka (Cytosperma chamissonis) from what was then the Ellice Islands, labouriously dug up acres of their rough coral ground two metres down to the fresh-water lens and planted flourishing crops. When manufactured hooks and monofilament lines appeared they set upon those as well, and, much later, enthusiastically set about acquiring aluminium dinghies and Japanese outboard engines. Nobody in the atolls now refers to all this as ‘development’, however. It is regarded simply as common sense, what the people themselves did, for themselves, to make their production more efficient and to secure their food supply.
‘Development’ in the Pacific is commonly understood in a different sense, one whose hegemony effectively began with Harry Truman’s acceptance speech on 20 January, 1949.
We must embark [President Truman said] on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. The old imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit—has no place in our plans. What we envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair dealing (quoted in Esteva 1992:6).
As Esteva puts it, ‘[u]nderdevelopment began, then, on January 20, 1949. On that day, two billion people became underdeveloped. In a very real sense, from that time on, they ceased being what they were…’ (1992:7). The old meanings of development, based on both religious and biological metaphors, faded in the popular mind. Development became a global project, directed from on high. It became even further impoverished through being taken over by economists who reduced it to economic growth, measured by indicators such as gross national product, launched by various international agencies in the 1950s. The failures were notable, with many projects having tragic consequences for the very people they were designed to assist.
Since then a variety of planning adjustments have been proposed and put into operation, all of them emphasising in one way or another the importance of integrating what was called the ‘social and cultural’ with the ‘economic’. The list of the well-meaning initiatives is a long one: the ‘unified approach’, ‘integrated development’, ‘another development’, ‘human-centred development’, the ‘basic needs approach’, ‘endogenous development’, ‘human development’—and so forth, down to the diverse current enthusiasms for ‘sustainable development’—as the various international agencies have competed for attention and funding. There is no doubt about the sincerity of the efforts, yet the central contradictions remain.
Meanwhile in some parts of the Pacific at least, economic goals have been effectively integrated with local society by using the kinship and family loyalties which had long been a central feature of ‘traditional culture.’ Emigration from Tonga, Samoa and other ‘MIRAB’ (Bertram and Watters 1985) countries grew rapidly in importance, and, as it did so, not only did the volume of remittances sent back to sustain and improve the material situation of the home societies increase, but they also allowed the elaboration of ‘culture,’ feeding into the complex displays and ceremonial exchanges at the heart of traditional economics and status. This has involved a double irony. First, although the whole process has relied on essentially ‘cultural’ linkages, it has also been an exercise in pure textbook economic rationality, as people have simply deployed their labour resources to places where they can get the best return. Second, overseas remittances have come to be of great importance in the macroeconomic sense, greatly exceeding in some states the earnings from visible exports, and providing about half GDP.
Yet in spite of both the economic rationality of the process and the significant amounts of overseas exchange involved, remittances are nevertheless looked on as a suspect mechanism of development. The reason for this is not purely economic. As a ‘global project’ (usually, but not necessarily, involving aid, soft loans or foreign commercial investment) development operates within the context of nation states. It is thus inescapably a ‘top down’ process, driven and evaluated by macroeconomic principles—in whose light remittances are seen as entailing both high reservation wages (the wages at which people are willing to take up employment) and reductions in agricultural exports.
Development has also been affected by changing economic orthodoxies. From after the Second World War through to the end of the 1970s, development was essentially dependent on state planning. Programs were conceived and directed by economists of basically Keynesian outlook who placed heavy emphasis on infrastructure, capital formation and the expansion of public sectors. It was not until the early 1980s that the doctrines of free market and monetarism gained ascendence, with a profound effect on the reigning development paradigm. Since the mid 1980s the World Bank’s advice and aid to Pacific countries has turned away from support for public enterprise and physical investment, towards human development (education and health), the dismantling of government economic controls, and support for the private sector.
The development programs before 1980 or so, brought about a number of significant changes throughout the Pacific. Although the general effect was to increase social welfare and induce some economic growth, the changes involved new social and regional inequalities and the results were not uniformly benign (Overton 1988:10). They also fuelled the emergence of a category, variously called ‘middle class’ or ‘bureaucratic élite,’ made up of people separated to some extent by education and economic interests from those in the ‘traditional’ rural sectors.
The new free-market, monetarist orthodoxy has prompted widespread anxieties and criticism. As Claire Slatter (1994) has pointed out, much of the World Bank’s recent analyses of Pacific island economies (1991;1993) is confused and contradictory. While drawing attention to relatively high living standards and favourable social indicators that have been achieved in spite of constraints, the World Bank fails to attribute these facts to the overall success of the older development model. The developers’ enthusiasm for private sector development and the opening of opportunities for foreign investment is also suspect, not only because of the likelihood that most of the profits will be repatriated overseas but also because, it is felt, social and economic inequalities will become more acute.
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