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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [-15], (9) Lines: 83 to 9 ——— 0.0pt PgV ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [-15], (9) introduction Revitalization as History and Theory Michael E. Harkin As the title of this book makes clear, we are examining two classes of cultural phenomena (political-religious movements) within the same basic theoretical framework. The central thesis of this book is indeed that the model of the revitalization movement, associated mainly with the work of the Americanist anthropologist and ethnohistorian Anthony F. C. Wallace, is a useful way to view both sets of phenomena, from North America and the Pacific. This goes against the grain of previous analysis, which has tended to keep the two quite separate and to reserve the term revitalization movement for the former. In our view, this confuses the map with the territory, as Gregory Bateson (1972:454–455) used to say, for it mistakes a theoretical lens with the ethnographic object itself. Apart from tradition and bibliographic association, there is no reason to consider the Ghost Dance a more typical version of revitalization than, say, John Frum or other manifestations of the “cargo cult.” It is necessary to address, at the outset, the question of revitalization movements in relation to cargo cult. We must, in the first instance, recognize that descriptions and analyses of the two come from entirely different , and rarely intersecting, traditions of political control and description and ethnography. Postmodernist accounts of cargo cults (Kaplan 1995; Lindstrom 1990, 1993) have stressed the importance of these representational strategies in constituting the phenomena themselves. This is surely an important factor. The British colonial and ethnographic tradition has tended to make great use of the trope of irony (in opposition to the Americanist tradition, which has been far fonder of tragedy); all those novels of the colonial encounter, from Haggard through Forster to Naipul, have been redolent with the irony that derives from what Homi Bhabha has called “the ambivalence of mimicry” (1984, 1994:86). That is, the inability, and, indeed, active unwillingness, on the part of colonial xvi harkin 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 [-16], (10 Lines: 98 ——— 0.0pt P ——— Normal PgEnds: [-16], (10 subjects to achieve a culturally valid performance of the norms of the ruling society leads to the sort of overproduction of certain symbolic elements that is found in cargo cults. The readiness of colonial administrators and ethnographers to accept such descriptions, which, viewed from an interactionist perspective, may have conditioned subaltern people to take up such strategies that would attract the most attention, offers a reasonable explanation for the particular characteristics that cultural movements in Oceania and other parts of the British Empire took on. Lamont Lindstrom (1990, 1993) goes further and states that discourses of cargo and cult participate in a chiasmic structure of power and knowledge. As Westerners (colonial officials, anthropologists) construct a discourse of cult, it is at the same time a structure of power and control. Conversely, Melanesians use cargo as the key term in a discourse that attempts to structure relations with the West. Both discursive regimes possess criteria that allow them to establish the truth conditions of individual utterances. Knowing all this, we are in the position of establishing a metadiscourse, which incorporates both discourses as well as our own Foucauldian knowledge of the functioning of such discursive systems. This seems, ultimately, to be self-defeating, for a variety of reasons. Any explanatory or interpretive system is seen a priori to be a form of the exercise of power, rather than a framework for understanding. Surely the important contemporary forms of Western power (economic globalization , military hegemony) are in no way dependent on cultic discourses. Anthropology must cease to exist if we view our own tentative attempts to comprehend cultural practices as ipso facto exercises in discursive and political power. A second problem with such views is that they tend to dissolve the object of study into the ether of postmodern reflexivity, which is, in the final analysis, not terribly reflexive. As Marshall Sahlins (1993, 1995) has persuasively argued, extreme constructivist arguments...

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