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313 Cultural Change in Oceania Remembering the Historical Questions Peter Hempenstall Ordinarily a historian among anthropologists is a nervous creature. The Malinowskian tradition of European anthropology condemned the historian to the status of inferior cousin in a family devoted to studying the functional regularities of social structure in “other cultures.” History was regarded as an oversimplified project, a fact-grubbing chronicle or speculative flight of fantasy incapable of connecting with the reality of past societies. Historical anthropology was a weaker variety of the real anthropology, in which “social change” might be studied by comparing the start and end points of a particular society and evaluating the amount of change that occurred between. But anthropology has been thoroughly “historicized” since then (Biersack 1991). Temporality as a process has been incorporated into explanations of cultural shifts, and anthropologists have become adept at exploring how time is differently conceptualized, represented, symbolized, and constructed by social groups (Hastrup 1992: 124). Today, historians of the Pacific Islands will often turn first to the anthropologist, not just for an understanding of the social structure with which they are dealing, but for a sophisticated exploration of the dynamic of change occurring among a historical island population. So this Pacific historian feels reasonably comfortable that he is among friends, friends whose studies of moments of cultural transformation in Oceania have provided a richly woven and suggestive tapestry of events, customs, signs, and practices encompassing the multiple regions in which the Pacific Islands lie. The breathtaking objects in the Cook/Forster Collection of artifacts from the University of Göttingen link us to a series of historical moments in eighteenth-century Europe. And they join us to the overarching theme of the conference, the process of ever-changing answers that these artifacts give to the questions raised by each age that observes them—their shifting meanings as contexts change. The historian would perhaps emphasize the context before studying the shift in meaning, a point Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin highlighted in her opening address on the collecting habits of the eighteenth century and the way the University of Göttingen’s treasures came into its hands. Hauser-Schäublin from the beginning emphasized the point that a historian would make in observing these stunning objects: they are not a direct window onto a past that is 230 years old. They are signals we must interpret from our present standpoint as professional observers with 314 | Cultural Change in Oceania all the scholarly apparatus at our command, but with imagination as well: imagination to understand the meaning these still-living objects had for their contemporary creators and users, as well as for the native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders who, during the exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, came to venerate the objects that linked them to their ancestors. It is in that space of scholarly craft combined with historical imagination that historians work. In the spirit of that enterprise I would venture to gather the myriad cases presented during the conference, with their thoughtful analyses, into some kind of order that makes personal sense and to highlight the themes of historical importance and explanatory value that the historian might gently encourage his colleagues to remember. The first is the importance of making identifiable persons, subjective presences, part of the evaluation of structural changes as well as elements in the story of transformative events. A concentration on cultural structures, on the genealogies of ideas, on the process of transformation of traditions, can mask the personal agency through which such processes are enacted. “Agency” has become a cult word in the lexicon of critical theory, though it has been around within the literary genre of biography for a hundred years as the recognition of an individual’s constrained autonomy of action. Biography itself has been made to bear an increasing weight of relevance in the twenty-first century as it encompasses the “lives” of cities, institutions, and ideas, as well as having to cover the sins of the person. At a variety of levels the analyses of cultural change during the conference recognized these notions of “biography.” The lives of persons were implicit in Elfriede Hermann’s stress on traditions as the product of interactions among social actors in particular contexts, who were the agents for transforming cultural traditions . “Biography” was implicit too in Martha Kaplan’s playfully serious analysis of the “life” and “career” of Fijian bottled water in the United States, and in Deborah Waite’s “cultural biography” of the...

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