LA PROSA ATICA MAS ANTIGUA

Anthropologists and historians alike have recently debated what historical consciousness might be. The array of definitions is heterogeneous, and only partially overlapping across the two disciplines, the conceptual ‘borrowings’ between them notwithstanding. In this last section I attempt to operate a cold fusion, to evoke Thomas’ insights on hybridity, of different perspectives on historical consciousness.67 In my

reading of the literature, two premises forcefully emerge: 1) the fact that historical consciousness is culturally inflected, and 2) that different forms of historical consciousness stand in opposition to (a supposedly) Western historicism. While such statements are acceptable in general terms, I prefer a critique of the lurking essentialism entailed in both assumptions, suggesting that historical consciousness, rather than being

Occidentalism: Gift and Commodity Systems’, in Occidentalism : Images of the West: Images of the West, ed. James G. Carrier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 85–108.

65 _{Quotes respectively from Hirsch and Moretti, ‘One Past Many Pasts: Varieties of Historical} Holism in Melanesia and the West’, 293, 283.

66 _{Hirsch and Moretti, 294 (my italics).}

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a mode of experiencing time, emerges as the product of competing interests in the field of history-making.

Recent scholarly efforts to understand historical consciousness are indebted to an older dialogue between anthropology and history which reached its apex in the 1980s. This legacy, whether openly acknowledged or not, has largely framed the premises on which current debates have developed. At the most basic level, the Promised Land between anthropology and history has turned out to be a Balkanised territory. Ethnohistory, historical anthropology, anthropological history, oral history, social history, microhistory, cultural history, ethnographic history are only a sample of labels used on either side to connote fairly disparate scholarly endeavours emerging from that encounter. No wonder then, as Charles Stewart has noted recently, that the ethnography of historical consciousness has ‘remained uncoordinated, with no distilled methodology or comparative synthesis and certainly no orientating label’.68

Given the complexity of the subject (no less so for some terminological indeterminacy), I first discuss two definitions of historical consciousness with which I substantially agree. The first is by historian Jörn Rüsen, who conceptualises historical consciousness in relation to the domain of morality. Rüsen postulates ‘the need for historical consciousness in order to deal with moral values and moral reasoning’, and links this with the temporal orientation – connecting past, present, and future – inherent in human agency:

In its temporal orientation, historical consciousness ties the past to the present in a manner that bestows on present actuality a future perspective. This implied reference to the future time is contained in the historical interpretation of the present, because such interpretation must enable us to act.69

This formulation offers a double advantage in conceptualising the case of Kerewo frustrated modernity. On one hand, it illuminates why Kerewo discuss historical episodes of their colonial past in markedly moral terms and, on the other, why through the Peace and Reconciliation ceremony, past, present, and future are connected through ritual action.

The other definition I want to discuss at this point is that advanced from the field of anthropology by Eric Hirsch and Charles Stewart: ‘“historicity” describes a human situation in flow, where versions of the past and future […] assume present form in

68 _{Charles Stewart, ‘Historicity and Anthropology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 45, no. 1} (2016): 81.

69 _{Quotes respectively from Jörn Rüsen, ‘Historical Consciousness: Narrative Structure, Moral} Function, and Ontogenic Development’, in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter C. Seixas (Toronto - Buffalo - London: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 65, 67.

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relation to events, political needs, available cultural forms and emotional dispositions’.70

Such a formulation captures the cultural variability of the forms which presentations of the past can assume, and avoids the cultural essentialism that undermines much current conceptualisation of historical consciousness. Such cultural essentialism shows itself in two main ways: 1) in the equation of historical consciousness with culture, and 2) in the dichotomy that opposes a Western notion of history to other non-Western forms of knowledge of the past. In the last part of this section I suggest that such cultural essentialism can be overcome by looking at history-making as a field of power where competing visions and interests struggle to maintain or create a dominant position. Before expanding on this reading of historical consciousness, though, I discuss in some detail how cultural essentialism informs much of the existing literature.

Apologies to Sahlins

Within the discipline of history, the reflection on historical consciousness has been developed primarily in relation to comparative historiography, the discipline that, broadly speaking, interrogates the socio-political and epistemological dimension of historical accounts written by professional historians. These reflections have generally adopted Western-derived professional historiography as the yardstick for comparison.71

Such an ethnocentric approach comes as no surprise, especially in light of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s insights on the indispensability of the historicist paradigm in writing history, despite its limitations.72

What I find most problematic about the frame within which historians have dealt with historical consciousness is the ideal-typification of broad socio-cultural areas (the West, Japan, Africa, and the like), and the virtual reduction of historical consciousness to collective memory.73 The broad characterisation and identification of historical

70 _{Eric Hirsch and Charles Stewart, ‘Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity’, History and}

Anthropology 16, no. 3 (2005): 262. See also Chris Ballard, ‘Oceanic Historicities’, The Contemporary Pacific 26, no. 1 (2014): 96–124.

71 _{Jörn Rüsen, ‘Some Theoretical Approaches to Intercultural Comparative Historiography’,}

History and Theory 35, no. 4 (1996): 5–22; Chris Lorenz, ‘Comparative Historiography: Problems and Perspectives’, History and Theory 38, no. 1 (1999): 25–39; Jörn Rüsen, ed.,

Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate (New York - Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002); Peter C. Seixas, ed., Theorizing Historical Consciousness (Toronto - Buffalo - London: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

72 _{Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference} (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000).

73 _{These problems are respectively visible in Rüsen, Western Historical Thinking; and Peter C.} Seixas, ‘Introduction’, in Theorizing Historical Consciousness, ed. Peter C. Seixas (Toronto - Buffalo - London: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 8–10.

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consciousness with a single (often spatial) image as characterising a specific culture (or nation, or geographical agglomerate) closely resembles the way in which some anthropologists have conceptualised historical consciousness as coterminous with culture, which I discuss at length below. An early formulation by the historian Jörn Rüsen seems to echo Sherry Ortner’s notion of key symbol:

This “historical sense” is an image, a vision, a concept, or an idea of time which mediates the expectations, desires, hopes, threats, and anxieties connecting the minds of people in their present-day activities with the experiences of the past. […] past and future merge into an entire image, vision, or concept of temporal change and development which functions as an integral part of cultural orientation in the present.74

A genealogy for this formulation can be traced back to Clifford Geertz’s notion of culture, which has been particularly influential among historians.75 I have dealt with the

Geertzian legacy on Pacific history elsewhere, hence I limit myself to recalling the critique offered by Italian practitioners of microhistory, who have argued convincingly that historical works inspired by the Geertzian notion of culture rest upon a pre-given cultural context, which does not account for its own formation and thus ultimately results in a tautology.76

74 _{Rüsen, ‘Some Theoretical Approaches to Intercultural Comparative Historiography’, 13.} Sherry B. Ortner, ‘On Key Symbols’, American Anthropologist 75, no. 5 (1973): 1338–46. Parenthetically it should be noted that the perspective advanced by Rüsen in this article about the threat of contingency for human agency is in line with Stewart’s usage of the notion of crisi della presenza elaborated by the Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino; see Charles Stewart,

Dreaming and Historical Consciousness in Island Greece (Chicago - London: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 213–15.

75 _{An insightful discussion on the uneven incorporation of Geertz and Sahlins in the works of} historians can be found in Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Is Vice Versa? Historical Anthropologies and Anthropological Histories’, in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terrence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 17–51. On Geertz see in particular Aletta Biersack, ‘Local Knowledge, Local History: Geertz and Beyond’, in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley - Los Angeles - London: University of California Press, 1989), 72–96. See also Dario Di Rosa, ‘Microstoria, Pacific History, and the Question of Scale: Two or Three Things That We Should Know About Them’, The Journal of Pacific History, vol. 53, n. 1 (2018), 25–43.

76 _{This critique has been advanced by Edoardo Grendi and Giovanni Levi on the pages of the} Italian journal Quaderni Storici; the English reader can find a good summary in Giovanni Levi,

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Marshall Sahlins, on the other hand, made central to his scholarly interests the process of transformation of the structural relations constituting specific cultures. As Geertz became influential among historians, Sahlins’ work has been key to shaping anthropology’s end of the encounter with history, and thus to the later conceptualisation of historical consciousness. Suffice to consider Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney’s early and influential definition of historical consciousness as ‘the culturally patterned way or ways of experiencing and understanding history’.77 Such a formulation has softened over

time, as evident in the most recent programmatic statement by Stephan Palmié and Charles Stewart: ‘the anthropology of history that we propose focuses foremost on the principles […] – call them broadly cultural – that underpin practices of inquiry into the past, as well as the forms and modes in which the past is represented to others’.78 This

approach has the advantage of focusing on performative acts of representation, hence social activities, which a focus on culture alone need not entail.

To summarise Sahlins’ reflections on history is a tremendous task, not only because of the sheer quantity of publications to consider, but also because each one seems a permutation of the dictum plus ça change plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they remain the same); arguably the contrary also applies: the more things seems the same, the more they are actually different.79 The core of Sahlins’

historical analysis can be summarised in the propositions that 1) culture (or structure), especially as encoded in religious-political cosmologies, shapes the actions of historical actors, and that 2) the relationships among cultural categories can be rearranged through their praxis in a novel context (event). Sahlins famously termed the interplay between structure and event (or culture and history) the ‘structure of the conjuncture’:

Nothing guarantees that the situation encountered in practice will stereotypically follow from the cultural categories by which the circumstances are interpreted and acted upon. Practice, rather, has its own dynamics – a “structure of the conjuncture” – which meaningfully defines the persons and the objects that are parties to it. And these contextual values, if unlike the definitions culturally presupposed, have the capacity then of working back on the conventional values.

‘On Microhistory’, in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, by Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 102–9.

77 _{Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, ‘Introduction: The Historicization of Anthropology’, in Culture}

through Time: Anthropological Approaches, ed. Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 4.

78 _{Stephan Palmié and Charles Stewart, ‘Introduction: For an Anthropology of History’, HAU:}

Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 1 (2016): 209–210 (my italics).

79 _{See Alan Rumsey, ‘The Articulation of Indigenous and Exogenous Orders in Highland New} Guinea and Beyond’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology 17, no. 1 (2006): 47–69.

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Entailing unprecedented relations between the acting subjects […] practice entails unprecedented objectifications of categories.80

Whether in the case of the death of Captain James Cook in Hawai’i, or the repeated attempts by Maōri to bring down British flagpoles in New Zealand, Indigenous historical action is interpreted in light of what Sahlins terms ‘heroic history’ or ‘mytho- praxis’. By this he means that through ‘the presence of divinity among men, as in the person of the sacred king or the powers of the magical chief’, any action of these figures of authority ‘becomes synonymous with divine action’.81 Indeed ‘historical actions’

become ‘the projection of mythical relations’.82 Within Sahlins’ corpus the (partial)

exception to the mytho-praxis logic is exemplified by the war between Bau and Rewa polities in mid-19th century Fiji. In this case it is the avuncular relation known as vasu

(uterine nephew), hence the structural position between the contending parties, which guides the actions of the people involved rather than cosmological views themselves.

As Sahlins himself wrote ‘such effects as transformation and reproduction are maximally distinguishable in situations of culture contact’;83 and in fact his work has

inspired much scholarship on the so-called ‘first contact’ situation that, in Melanesia especially, has put to test and questioned the efficacy of this model.84 The bulk of this

80 _{Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History}

of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 35 (my italics).

81 _{Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,} 1985), 35.

82 _{Sahlins, Islands of History, 54.}

83 _{Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities, 64.}

84 _{Marilyn Strathern, ‘Artefacts of History: Events and the Interpretation of Images’, in Culture}

and History in the Pacific, ed. Jukka Siikala (Helsinki: Transactions of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 1990), 25–44; Marilyn Strathern, ‘The Decomposition of an Event’,

Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 2 (1992): 244–54; Edward L. Schieffelin, ‘Early Contact as Drama and Manipulation in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea: Pacification as the Structure of the Conjuncture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37, no. 3 (1995): 555–80; Edward L. Schieffelin and Robert Crittenden, Like People You See in a Dream: First Contact in Six Papuan Societies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Chris Ballard, ‘La fabrique de l’histoire: Evêmenent, mémoire et récit dans les Hautes Terres de Nouvelle- Guinée’, in Les rivages du temps: Histoire et anthropologie du Pacifique, ed. Isabelle Merle and Michel Naepels (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 2003), 111–34; Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkézoff, and Darrell Tryon, eds., Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence

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literature focuses on particular events, usually juxtaposing written records with oral accounts, trying to uncover the cultural logic of the encounter. Implicitly unquestioned though is another of Sahlins’ assumptions, namely ‘that different cultural orders have their own modes of historical action, consciousness, and determination - their own historical practice’.85

According to Sahlins, much scholarship confuses ‘history with change’, a notion resting on what he sees as ‘ossified oppositions’ such as ‘stability and change or structure and history’, and especially on the notion of ‘the past as radically different from the present’.86 Sahlins’ ‘claim is not that culture determines history, only that it

organizes it’, and it is this feature that lurks behind much work on historical consciousness.87 The strength of Sahlins’ work is his attention to actual actions and

practices, while in later scholarship it seems that the claim is that (largely mythical) narratives constitute a group’s historical consciousness. Let’s consider an example.

John Taylor demonstrates the centrality of the symbol of the tree in Sia Raga (Vanuatu) historical consciousness, as an image capable of articulating both emplacement and movement through its constituent parts: roots and branches.88 Taylor

shows how this key symbol, to adopt Ortner’s famous formulation, reverberates through domains of Sia Raga social space such as the cosmology inscribed in the landscape, kinship, the gendered division of sacred spaces and its architectural materialisation. In the economy of Taylor’s ethnography, Sia Raga historical consciousness is discussed in connection with a particular narrative known as ‘the story of Jimmy’. This recounts the vicissitudes of a white boy who escaped from a plantation in Fiji, ending up among the Sia Raga, who raised him. After a period of intense relationships which were cultivated

Particularly insightful is Klaus Neumann’s critique of ‘first contact’ literature; see Klaus Neumann, ‘Finding An Appropriate Beginning For A History Of The Tolai Colonial Past’,

Canberra Anthropology 15, no. 1 (1992): 1–19; Klaus Neumann, Not the Way It Really Was: Constructing the Tolai Past (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992); Klaus Neumann, ‘“In Order to Win Their Friendship”: Renegotiating First Contact’, The Contemporary Pacific

6, no. 1 (1994): 111–45.

85 _{Marshall Sahlins, ‘Other Times, Other Customs: The Anthropology of History’, American}

Anthropologist 85, no. 3 (1983): 518. Yet later, Sahlins reformulated this statement as such ‘distinct cultural orders have their own, distinctive modes of historical production’ or ‘Different cultures, different historicities’ Sahlins, Islands of History, x (my italics).

86 _{Sahlins, Islands of History, 144–45.}

87 _{Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides: Understanding History as Culture and Vice Versa} (Chicago - London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 11.

88 _{John Patrick Taylor, The Other Side: Ways of Being and Place in Vanuatu (Honolulu:} University of Hawaii Press, 2008).

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as Jimmy became socialised into Sia Raga community, a European ship arrived and took Jimmy away, thus abruptly severing the relations that had been formed. According to Taylor, this story articulates tensions between Christianity (which is not mentioned in the narrative) and kastom, the uneven access to cash economy, and more generally asymmetrical relationships with Europeans. This interpretation permits Taylor to state that

telling histories on north Pentecost is not simply about recounting immutable pasts […]. Within specific social contexts and at particular moments, histories provide lenses through which people make sense of their own presents. They are also used as a part of that work by which people seek to shape others, and in doing so give shape to their shared futures. Here, the story of Jimmy is used to focus aspects of the north Pentecost colonial past, and more important, to show how it has become a vehicle of social and political assessment and agency in the neo-colonial present.89

Yet what Taylor’s monograph seems to be missing is a precise description of those ‘specific social contexts’ and ‘particular moments’, or what ‘the neo-colonial present’ looks like in everyday life for Sia Raga communities. Given the statement quoted above, it is surprising to discover that the text of ‘the story of Jimmy’ analysed is a collation of different versions, leaving the reader uncertain as to whether the variants were generated in performative contexts or not, and what changing contexts might tell us about the intentions of the narrator. The ‘story of Jimmy’ is an instance of the co- presence of the rootedness and movement that echoes through other Sia Raga narratives. The key symbol of the tree is proven to do its cognitive job. Yet, if such a symbol provides the syntax, the reader learns little about the intentionality of the speakers. With this example I do not intend to dismiss symbols from the analysis of historical consciousness, but rather to suggest that they are not constitutive of it.

As I discuss in Chapter 2, narratives (mythical or otherwise) do provide the means of establishing, cutting, or rearranging social relations, but are not in and of themselves constitutive of historical consciousness. Narratives (Koselleck’s ‘space of experience’) provide a charter with which to navigate the present, but the selection of which narrative is deployed cannot be inferred in advance. This is clearly shown by