Concluding remarks - jps.auckland.ac.nz

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Concluding remarks Edmund Leach In the original Dunedin symposium which provides the base on which this volume has been erected I had a relatively easy task. I did not have to produce a paper of my own. I was simply expected to read the pre liminary versions of the submitted papers, join in the discussion, and end up with an off-the-cuff tailpiece evaluating what we had been up to. But now I am being asked to produce a version of the latter exercise which is suitable for publication and that I find extremely difficult, indeed almost impossible. The revised papers which are now assembled differ, both in dividually and as a collection, from those which were presented at Dunedin, and, although I know what the final version of the Hooper “Introduction” will be about, I have not, at this stage, actually read it. I still have a manuscript text of what I said in my Dunedin summing up, but on that occasion I illustrated my intentionally provocative comments with direct reference to points presented in the papers we had just been hearing. I now find that, almost without exception, these points of detail came either from papers which are not being reprinted here at all or else from papers which have been substantially rewritten. So what I can now offer is only the generality, not the nitty-gritty, of my original argument. It is very likely that, from the reader’s point of view, there will appear to be a total disjuncture between the individual papers and this closing commentary. If so, I apologise. The Dunedin seminar was entitled Transformations of Polynesian Culture. As the “Introduction” now emphasises, “historical” and “structuralist” interpretations of the word “transformation” resulted in contributions of two very different types. I shall start with a caricature of this polarity. On the one hand, there is the idea that once upon a time there was a precontact, precolonial, era when human societies lying outside the ambit of European explorers, traders, missionaries, colonial ad ministrators or whatever led an uncontaminated indigenous “tradi tional” cultural existence which was what professional ethnographers would always like to have observed and recorded but never did. What they did (and still can) observe is a version of such “traditional” society, transformed by the processes of historical change, the degree of such 219

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Concluding remarks

Edmund Leach

In the original Dunedin symposium which provides the base on which this volume has been erected I had a relatively easy task. I did not have to produce a paper of my own. I was simply expected to read the pre­liminary versions of the submitted papers, join in the discussion, and end up with an off-the-cuff tailpiece evaluating what we had been up to. But now I am being asked to produce a version of the latter exercise which is suitable for publication and that I find extremely difficult, indeed almost impossible.

The revised papers which are now assembled differ, both in­dividually and as a collection, from those which were presented at Dunedin, and, although I know what the final version of the Hooper “Introduction” will be about, I have not, at this stage, actually read it. I still have a manuscript text of what I said in my Dunedin summing up, but on that occasion I illustrated my intentionally provocative comments with direct reference to points presented in the papers we had just been hearing. I now find that, almost without exception, these points of detail came either from papers which are not being reprinted here at all or else from papers which have been substantially rewritten. So what I can now offer is only the generality, not the nitty-gritty, of my original argument. It is very likely that, from the reader’s point of view, there will appear to be a total disjuncture between the individual papers and this closing commentary. If so, I apologise.

The Dunedin seminar was entitled T ra n sfo rm a tio n s o f P o lynesian C u ltu re . As the “Introduction” now emphasises, “historical” and “structuralist” interpretations of the word “transformation” resulted in contributions of two very different types. I shall start with a caricature of this polarity.

On the one hand, there is the idea that once upon a time there was a precontact, precolonial, era when human societies lying outside the ambit of European explorers, traders, missionaries, colonial ad­ministrators or whatever led an uncontaminated indigenous “tradi­tional” cultural existence which was what professional ethnographers would always like to have observed and recorded but never did. What they did (and still can) observe is a version of such “traditional” society, tra n s fo rm e d by the processes of historical change, the degree of such

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change depending upon particular circumstances.And here it needs to be emphasised that even the very first

European ethnographers were unable to observe an “uncontaminated” indigenous cultural situation because, as Sahlins (1981) most brilliantly displays, the explorers themselves had, by their very presence, already become a part of the observed situation. Yet, even today, many ethnographers still have their eyes fixed on a kind of mirage, “the pre­contact traditional society” which they hope to uncover by some kind of time reversal process of “detransformation”.

None of our contributors argued explicitly in this way but quite a number of them seemed to have had this sort of imagery in mind. Their evidence might come from the present or very recent past but their real concern was with what was supposed to have happened in the pre­colonial phase of Polynesian history.

At the other extreme is the synchronic, structuralist, view of cultural transformation which, for all practical purposes, ignores the processes of historical change altogether. Here the idea is that cultural system A, existing timelessly in the ethnographic present in locality X, is a stru c tu ra l tra n s fo rm a tio n of another cultural system B, which likewise exists timelessly in the same ethnographic present but in a different locality Y.

Again there were several contributions to our Dunedin seminar which conformed to my ideal type. In Polynesian studies this is a model with a long history quite independent of that of the rise of structuralist theory.

There are a number of reasons why this should have been so. First, there is the simple but quite undeniable fact that the languages of Polynesia are strikingly similar. On the face of it this demonstrates a common historical origin for the societies concerned. Furthermore, until quite recently, a literalist interpretation of mythology led many Polynesian scholars to believe that the original dispersal from the (hypothetical) focus of Polynesian origins was a quite recent event in “real” time — a matter of centuries rather than millennia. This belief, coupled with the fact that Polynesian cultural subsystems appear unusually discrete (because of the isolation of the individual island groups surrounded by huge stretches of empty ocean) has made it very easy for comparative ethnographers to think that the observed varia­tions as between one cultural subsystem and another are permutations of a common theme.

It is a very simplistic idea. It seems to assume that at some unspecified point in time, in the not very far distant past, the ur- Polynesians and their culture became isolated from the other island and mainland peoples on all sides and that, thereafter, all development was endogenous, i.e., influences for change came from within Polynesia and not from outside. Thus, in the Sahlins contribution to this volume, features of “traditional” Maori culture are presented as direct structural transformations of features of “traditional” Hawaiian culture without any consideration for the fact that New Zealand and

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Hawai‘i are both geographically much closer to localities inhabited by speakers of non-Polynesian languages than they are to each other, and that, in any case, everything that we know about pre-Cook Maori and Hawaiian culture is a reconstruction which is heavily dependent upon the prior assumptions of European explorers who e x p e c t e d that the native inhabitants would be all more or less alike.

It was this idea that there was once a Polynesian culture which was, in some sense, a circumscribed closed system with internal varia­tions (“transformations”) which I was constantly provoked to criticise in the course of the Dunedin seminar. I did so on “structuralist” grounds. I think I was probably misunderstood so I will repeat the argument.

All varieties of structuralist theory contain a thesis that “cultural reality” is a “model in the mind” and that what is observable out there in the world in the form of human artefacts and patterns of empirical human behaviour is a “structural transformation” of this inaccessible entity, the model in the mind.

But structuralist theorists vary greatly among themselves in the in­terpretation which they put upon this concept of “model in the mind”. For Levi-Strauss the “mind” in question is a human universal, an innate attribute of human brains. This human mind has an innate propensity to generate myth in much the same way as all human beings have an innate propensity to learn how to speak. The deep structure of myth is a human universal in the same sense as the structure of phonological distinctive features or the deep structure of the grammar of natural languages are universals. If you believe this, and I most certainly do not, then the structural analysis of myth can draw its comparative data from any part of the world, regardless of time or place.

The fact that in his vast four volume M y th o lo g iq u es Levi-Strauss has, in fact, drawn most of his data from the ethnography of the “primitive” peoples of North and South America has no logical basis. Lêvi-Straussian theory does not postulate that the “mind” of American Indians is any different from the human mind anywhere else. It follows that it is illogical that Polynesian specialists who resort to a Levi- Strauss style of structuralist analysis should confine themselves to Polynesian examples. There is nothing special about the Polynesian mind which generates an anomalous singularity “Polynesian Culture”.

But structuralists are not all Levi-Straussians. At the opposite extreme are those who assume that the mind which generates obser­vable cultural phenomena is itself a product of the cultural environ­ment. Individuals who grow up in the same cultural environment may have very similar minds. They may make very similar projections on to the world out there of their internalised models in the mind; they may make very similar inferences about the cultural products of other in­dividuals who have grown up in the same cultural milieu. But the whole process of communication and pragmatic inference is delimited by context. The early 20th century culture of Tikopia, as meticulously recorded by Raymond Firth in a dozen monographs and some hun-

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dreds of learned articles, very probably contains within itself a variety of permutable configurations, as Hooper (1981) has claimed to demonstrate and Firth to repudiate. But the truth or falsity of such analyses is in no way dependent upon generalisations about “the human mind” considered as a human universal.

This sort of argument is clearly very uncongenial to many anthro­pologists. Indeed, the appearance of this symposium under the auspices of The Polynesian Society begs my case right from the start: Am I saying that Polynesia is a subjective figment of the ethnographic imagination which has no basis in objective empirical/historical reality? Not quite, perhaps, but very nearly. I do not believe that it makes any sense to talk about “Cultures” in the plural; I am particularly sceptical about the utility of such grand-scale concepts as American Culture or Indian Culture, or Islamic Culture which are frequently bandied around by such anthropological gurus as David Schneider (1968) Milton Singer (1984), and Clifford Geertz (1968). Polynesian Culture clearly falls into this same very amorphous category. The basic error (from my point of view) is the relief that cultural reality, as we observe it out there in the world, is no more than a “symbol” of a prior reality “in the mind” and that, even if we entirely alter what is out there in the material world, the reality in the mind persists unchanged. Such arguments are certainly to be found in the literature of “structuralism” and “semiotics”, but they derive from a wholly misplaced abstractionism.

It may be desirable, for political reasons, to invent or reinvent a mythical Polynesia which Polynesian children can learn about in the same way as Ghanaian children learn about a mythical precolonial Ghana, but as anthropologists we ought to view such macro-concepts with the deepest suspicion. A transformational approach to cultural analysis may be useful in Polynesia just as it may be useful elsewhere, but there was no historial unitary entity, Polynesian Culture, which has thus been subject to transformation over historial time and geographical space.

But it is not my purpose to be wholly destructive. Although the original paper contributors were using the concept of cultural transfor­mation in a variety of undigested ways, it seemed to me that in the end there was a large measure of agreement, particularly about two things.

First, Pacific Island ethnography, as it now exists, no matter whether it derives from “explorers” or sea-captains or missionaries or colonial administrators or Western-educated Pacific Islanders, or even professional anthropologists, represents cultural history filtered and distorted through the use of European categories of thought.

Second, present-day anthropologists, such as the contributors of this symposium, have an obligation to d eco n stru ct this European image of the Polynesian past and then, if it is possible, to reconstruct that image in terms of indigenous categories of thought. Sahlins’ writings about the local circumstances surrounding the death of Captain Cook in Hawai‘i in 1779 have shown that such an endeavour is not necessarily wholly vain. The future inhabitants of Polynesia will need a history which is not

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only dignified but also credible. It is the anthropologists (and the ar­chaeologists) who can potentially provide such a history. That is the goal towards which we should direct our endeavours and towards which some of the contributors to this symposium are already directing theirs.

R EFER EN C ES

Geertz, Clifford, 1968. Islam Observed. New Haven, Yale University Press. Hooper, Antony, 1981. Why Tikopia has Four Clans. Royal Anthropological

Institute Occasional Paper No.38. London.Sahlins, Marshall, 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities. Ann

Arbor, University of Michigan Press.Schneider, David M., 1968. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood

Cliffs (N.J.), Prentice-Hall.Singer, Milton, 1984. M an’s Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthro­

pology. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

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