The Politics of Tradition in the Pacific

Abstract

Over the last decade there has been a burgeoning interest in the politics of tradition, both within the Pacific region and elsewhere. As Jocelyn linnekin notes (this collection), in the early eighties there appeared, almost simultaneously, the general texts of Anderson (1983) and Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) and the specifically Pacific contributions on notions of kastom in Melanesia (Keesing and Tonkinson 1982) and identity in Hawai' i (Linnekin 1983). Since then there has been a veritable flood of scholarship on the cognate themes of tradition, nationalism and ethnicity not only from anthropologists, but historians, geographers, and political scientists.1 And although Pacific scholars areheadily engaged in this pursuit, scholars working on Australia, South East Asia and South Asia have been pursuing related questions with equal alacrity.2 Show more