Social Change In The Pacific Islands

Robillard

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317726821
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Commerce
• Categoría: Opérations de change

First published in 1992. The Pacific Ocean is the largest geographical feature on the face of the earth, covering about one third of its entire surface. Occupying part of that large expanse are the far-flung islands of the Pacific. As the papers of this volume clearly indicate, the post-world war II era and decolonization have brought unprecedented change, and the Pacific is now experiencing problems that were formerly associated with other Third World nations. Most Pacific countries have rapidly expanding populations, and over half of all Pacific Islanders are now in their teenage years or younger. Education and modern communications have served to increase aspirations and attracted by hopes of employment and the distractions of urban life, islanders are gravitating to urban centers.

1

Introduction: Social Change as the Projection of Discourse

Albert B. Robillard

Man is rendered incoherent by the coherence of his structural projection.

Baudrillard 1968, p. 69

This introduction is composed of two parts. The first is a postmodern formulation of the location of social change, where we should study it and how the formulation differs from other treatments of social change. The position is that social change is isomorphic with the discourse or language that makes social change a visible event, worthy of description, publication and circulation. This takes an expanded definition of discourse or language, one that includes every sign function imaginable. Discourse is not merely a neutral representational device but includes everything that can be represented – all the rationalities of interactional exchange. Discourse is the institutionalized world. This may be a strange part of the text for some readers, those not acquainted with the postmodern novel,¹ literary criticism, continental philosophy, and social theory. For the unacquainted, I have to ask for your indulgence for what will at first appear as a strange use of language.

In the first part of the introduction I am arguing for the possibility of an alternative analysis of social change. The possibility is an analysis of change based on the indigenous myths or cultures of the Pacific islands. Change would not be driven by the inner or teleological logic of capitalism interacting with precapitalist modes of production. Change would not be reduced to the anthropocentric notion of man creating a world by wresting his existence from nature. Change would be described as emanating from what secularized Europeans call gods, ghosts, spirits, magic, supernatural forces, rocks or powerful stones. The strangeness of the possibility of change as coming from other than man (as in Pacific island creation myths, Hawaiian Pele worship, or from the land, suffused with animistic powers, or from a claimed affinity with the land, as in the Taukei Movement in contemporary Fiji)² issues from our assumption that man is the fundamental datum. The point of the argument in the first part is to identify that political economies of Pacific island social change are as socially produced as creation myth accounts.

Professor Ron Crocombe (now retired from the University of the South Pacific, Fiji) has correctly charged that this book is by Europeans. One Indo-Fijian is represented. However, he is writing from an entirely European political economy perspective, as does the part-Maori author of a chapter. To the extent that the language of political economy is the authorized (institutionalized) language for detecting and reporting social change, this book is an elaboration of the European sensibility of the Pacific islands. Alternative accounts will have to come from a different discourse, as is being developed by Albert Wendt (1987). An analogous new rhetoric of social historiography is being created by Eduardo Galeano in his three volume history of the Americas (1985; 1990).

However, from the fact that this is a European account a further point can be made about the purpose of a postmodern critique. The proposition that the Pacific islands are constructed by the particular discourse we inhabit is not put forward here merely to demystify or to claim some sort of nihilistic position (as in the claim that there is no ‘ultimate’ or ‘true’ Pacific islands). Hopefully, a postmodern critique of the language of theories of Pacific island social change will bring us, indigenous islander and Westerner alike, into a new and direct relationship with language, opening spaces for creating anew an even more diverse Pacific islands (Edmundson 1989, pp. 62–63). This should transform the hegemony of the Western languages.

This book is not comprehensive. The reader is referred to the Pacific Islands Yearbook (1991) for a comprehensive treatment of all Pacific island histories. The tour de force is, of course, Douglas Oliver’s The Pacific Islands, now in its third edition (1989). There are many island groups not covered here: Nauru, the Solomons, the Cooks, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Niue, Pitcairn Islands, Wallis and Futuna, and Easter Island. New Zealand is also missing. The objective of this book is not to be a comprehensive treatment of Pacific island social history. Rather, the object of the book is to present theoretically recognizable political economies of social change in the Pacific islands. The essays are demonstrations of critical political economic exposition and, in various degrees, reflections on theory in Pacific island analysis.

The second part of the introduction discusses the sixteen chapters in the book. A thumbnail description of the substance and theory of each chapter is given. Some of the chapters are comprehensive, tracing social change usually from contact with the West to the present. Others focus on a theme of social change, and nutrition. Diverse as they are, all the chapters are written as political economies of social change. The tension dealt with is the relationship between so-called traditional and capital-based political economies.

I. DISCOURSE OF SOCIAL CHANGE

This is a book about social change in the Pacific islands and theories of social change. This statement is not offered as a redundant statement of the title. I enter it here to fix before us, what for most of us, in our everyday attitude, are expressions taken for granted. Social change, the Pacific islands as a contiguous surface area of the globe, and theories of social change are not unfamiliar terms. They are used in academic discourse, the language of government and formal politics, the rhetoric of commerce and finance, the representations of nongovernment service organizations, and in the popular press, both print and electronic. We, writers and readers, are competent subjects in the referential exchange of these signs and their objects. We, who read this, are bound up in pragmatic activities, such as those listed above, wherein the use of these expressions produces and sustains our occupational and educated worlds. In short, the expressions are institutionalized features of our everyday pragmatic achievements, for example, our writing, reading, calculating, planning, educating, navigating, and correctly remembering the history of the social world. That the terms or expressions are part and parcel of a common world of subjects, that they account for and sustain a world of pragmatic achievements, is the phenomenon I will address in this part of the introduction.

This position, a genealogy of discourse, is not novel (Foucault 1977; Said 1979). At the same time, it is not the usual approach of Anglo-American social science, and it is not a common analytical frame in Pacific island studies. Certain lines of thought are roughly compatible. I am thinking of the recent work of Roger M. Keesing (1989) and also the theoretical work of Clifford Geertz (1983). Immanuel Wallerstein’s idea of how the notions of the rise of industry and the bourgeoisie are elementary truisms, used to explain and form the modern world, when there is ample evidence for alternative explanations, are examples of linguistic categories sustaining a social structure (1989). Wallerstein, though, does not travel in the direction of discourse analysis beyond making this observation.

The usual social science approach regards language, discourse, as an a priori, a given. The consensus social science, as Anthony Giddens calls it (1981), proceeds from the assumption that language stands in a positive correspondence relationship with an external world of language independent objects. Language is a relatively neutral vehicle of reference for a positive world. Most research articles are written in the third person, indicating the passive role of language, the conveyor of objective facts. Referential disputes can be settled by inspection of a measurable extended world. For the reader steeped in this tradition of linguistic positivity, which includes all of us in the contemporary world of calculative rationality, the idea that social change is to be studied as the pragmatics of language, discourse, is strange. Social change is something that occurs ‘out there’, in this tradition, and not in the discourse of a theory of social change. A descriptive theoretical language is considered prior to the phenomenon of change, something distinct from the objects signified. This is the so-called bi-planar theory of language (Finlay 1988), language and signified objects each occupying a separate realm of reality.

I do not propose to review the tradition of linguistic positivism and its implications for social science and theories of change. I refer to the reader to a highly instructive book by Michael Shapiro, The Politics of Representation (1988) and an earlier book by the same author, Language and Political Understanding (1981). Shapiro’s thesis is that language constructs and maintains a network of social institutions, including the institution of membership in the network of social institutions, including the institution of membership in the network. Also, the two-volume work by Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), provides a useful review of language and social science, as does his commentary on the methodology of the social sciences (1988). Habermas argues, following Alfred Schutz, Aaron Cicourel, and Melvin Pollner, that language contains common-sense knowledge which actors use to construct the in ter subjective world. I merely want to acknowledge the origins of the difference between the orthodox consensus social science and what is being proposed here. However, I am not unaware of the need to illustrate the point that theories of social change are bound up with, are part of, the practices, pragmatics, of producing their object. I will illustrate this point with four examples.

Ships’ Logs

Being that this book is about social change in the Pacific islands, it is perhaps appropriate, if not overly romantic, that the first illustration is from the age of ‘discovery’ in European sailing ships, an admittedly Eurocentric sense of exoticism and exploration. Let us consider the ship’s log. A ship’s log is the detailed record of the transit of the ship. It is written for the purpose of describing the procedures and conditions of sailing a particular route, from a point of embarkation to a destination. So detailed are the logs that they are often called rudders, providing instructions on how to sail to specific destinations. The rudders contain information on how to sail to the Pacific islands and Asia from Europe, coming around Africa and South America. Some provided instructions on how to navigate up the west coast of the Americas and how to catch the northern Pacific prevailing trade winds to sail downwind across the Pacific – to Guam and Manila, for example – and how to sail the southern Pacific trade wind route back to Peru and up to Acapulco (Steinberg 1987, pp. 91–3).³ This is the route of the Manila galleon trade. The ships’ logs provided instructions based on the time of year, sea and weather conditions, observation points on land and ocean and how to measure the course of the ship, using celestial, sea conditions, flora and fauna, and the gauging of time. Ships’ logs were precious possessions, guarded and fought over by the contending European explorer nations. They were regarded as maps to the material treasures and souls of Asia and Pacific.

The logs are written instructions. As such they span space and time, meaning that they are a continual repository or container of knowledge (Giddens 1981, p. 94). As a repository, even though located in objectivist time and space, they provide a kind of abstract cultural constancy of reference and review. Like books, reports, records, and computer files, the logs are a permanent description, something that is continuously available.

I do not want to argue that writing creates the constancy principle of objects. Much more is involved than writing, however important writing is to the maintenance of an objective world in correspondence to codified written knowledge. I want to submit that the logs, as usable representations, are embedded in the pragmatics of effectively reproducing the voyages that they describe. The ships’ logs are productively a part of the adequate procedure of reproducing actual voyages and giving calculative accounts, the practices of commercial and state administration. The utility, relevance, truth, rationality, scientism and whatever other predications of the logs are to be found in the activity whereby the logs are a practice or practices for the material reproduction of a social life-world. In other words, the logs as representations achieve their entire character, whatever that might be, ‘in and as of’ (Garfinkel 1967) the world they play a part in producing. The logs are a shared symbolic code, projecting and explaining the structure of sailing.

Ships’ logs are not antiquated. They are artifacts. They are of interest mainly to historians. No one uses them to sail. They contain items of observation-like sea monsters – that seem to the contemporary reader to be incredible. The logs have been eclipsed by virtually more elaborate and more predictive methods of navigation, like computer driven LORAN and inertial navigation. But today, just as before, when the logs were being written and used as rudders, the logs receive their topicality as of the social world they produce and maintain. Today it is the world of the historian and archivist. Yesterday, it was the world-space of the expansionary European powers, looking for wealth and souls.

Pacific Islanders and Anthropological Literature

The second illustration is from an experience I had six years ago. This example presages the critique developed below of the hegemony of political economy in the representation of social change. I was involved in a teaching program for Pacific island mental health workers. Some of the students were Pacific island physicians and some were mental health counselors, they were asked to make presentations to the class about the social and cultural organization of everyday life in their home villages. The teaching faculty of the program was astonished to find that the students would only talk about their social and cultural structures in terms of the established and published ethnographies. The problem for us was that we wanted to have the trainees and ourselves think about contemporary social interaction in the village, how routine topics in everyday conversation were related – played a part in structuring events – to current mental health problems in the village population, for example, adolescent suicide, schizophrenia, depression, and violent behavior. Try as we might, we could not get the trainees, or the majority of the faculty, for that matter, to think of village social structure as sequentially produced, moving through time and space as of the symbolic interaction that made structure visible.

What we received were formal reports on kinship systems, land tenure, traditional political structure and religion, mythology, indigenous fishing, agriculture, and transportation technologies. The reports were entirely paraphrased versions of recognizable anthropological publications. The publications were often recited verbatim, frequently without attribution. The trainees and many of the faculty were astonished that we were insisting on descriptions of the mundane or ordinary (Pollner 1987); they could not see anything interesting or ‘worth telling’ (as in tell a story) in everyday life, focusing instead on the monumental, generalized descriptions of the past. These general or totalizing (Deleuze and Guattari 1972) descriptions of social and cultural organization were felt to be the descriptions of the essential social life of the village. They objectified the master cultural plan, as if the plan were the motor of interactional life. The accounts of published anthropology exercised a textual supremacy over experience. Current social life, especially everyday interaction, was approached as if it were a vulgar version of the indigenous culture, the present being corrupted by the West. Moreover, the real object of description, the influence of the West aside, was contained in the totalizing or general descriptions of the thereby monumentalized or traditionalized social and cultural organization of the trainees’ islands.

The issue here is not whether the trainees’ use of the anthropological literature in making their descriptions produced false descriptions, as in the creation of neotraditional culture, discussed by Philibert in his chapter on Vanuatu in this volume. For the present, I want to point out that the trainees, when asked to provide a description, felt constrained to use a particular form of representation, the Official’ published anthropological literature. The storibility of their social world, with the professional Western audience, was contained in these monumentalized descriptions ignored and were incapable of describing the interactively mundane.

The use of the official language of anthropology, as the authorized voice, is analogous t...