Continuity and Constraint: Reconstructing the Concept of Tradition from a Pacific Perspective
Date
1997
Authors
Contributor
Advisor
Department
Instructor
Depositor
Speaker
Researcher
Consultant
Interviewer
Narrator
Transcriber
Annotator
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Hawai'i Press - Center for Pacific Islands Studies
Volume
Number/Issue
Starting Page
Ending Page
Alternative Title
Abstract
In the postmodern world, tradition and identity are supplanting modernist political
ideologies in the discourse about conflict. Historians and anthropologists
who write about tradition necessarily enter the political arena within which the
content and meaning of tradition are contested. In the 1980s, social scientists became
sensitive to this issue. During that decade the most important contributions
to the study of tradition focused on the issue of invention, the fashioning of representations
of the past to meet the needs of the present. The invention-of-tradition
literature made a useful contribution by linking tradition to such issues as
the reproduction of social forms, the interaction of culture and history to produce
change, and the role of human agency in both of these processes. Ultimately,
however, the emphasis on the malleability of tradition negates what is
ostensively affirmed in this literature—that a people’s traditions are a product of
their historically situated action. Too little attention is paid to the ways in which
interpretations of the past are constrained (and explained) by a determinate past
and to the threads of continuity that link the present to that past. In part, the
continuity that characterizes tradition is a consequence of the fact that traditions
are enacted or embodied. These issues are explored, in part, through a discussion
of the Fiji coups and their aftermath.
Description
View record on Scholarspace at http://hdl.handle.net/10125/13169
Keywords
Fiji coups, Postmodernism, Praxis, Manners and customs, Oceania -- Periodicals.
Citation
Turner, J. W. 1997. Continuity and Constraint: Reconstructing the Concept of Tradition from a Pacific Perspective. The Contemporary Pacific 9 (2): 345-81.
Extent
37 pages
Format
Geographic Location
Time Period
Related To
Related To (URI)
Table of Contents
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States
Rights Holder
Local Contexts
Collections
Email libraryada-l@lists.hawaii.edu if you need this content in ADA-compliant format.