Melanesian socialism: anthropology of a post-colonial illusion

Critical essays by Joel Robbins have regularly taken aim at a certain anthropological culture that is too oriented towards "continuity thinking" (2007), in the wake of a discipline that in its early days was the perfect embodiment of a "science of continuity" (ibid.). Anthropologists were trained to be uncomfortable with the study of radical cultural change and rapid, drastic social transformation. Even today, Robbins adds, few anthropologists are capable of laying the foundations for an "anthropology of revolution" (ibid.: 10). While this observation may seem debatable for the contemporary period, epistemic conservatism has long remained a feature of political anthropology of the Pacific. The absence of anthropological reflection on the social and cultural implications of nation-building policies in this part of the world until the 1980s was characteristic of the perpetuation of models that privileged the analysis of cultural continuities. A case representative of his era illustrates well the weight of conservatism that characterized Pacific anthropology until recently. When the first wave of decolonization in the Pacific began in 1962 with the accession to sovereignty of the Western Samoan Islands, anthropologists overwhelmingly preferred to focus on Marshall Sahlins' famous article Poor Man, Rich Man, Big Man, Chiefs:Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia (1963). In fifteen pages, the author proposed a regional theory of power based on a classic colonial comparison, the ethnocultural opposition between Melanesia and Polynesia. A few years later, the Tongan-born anthropologist Epeli Hau'ofa was the first Pacific voice to criticize what he considered to be "a clever, thoughtless and insulting piece of writing [...] ; the whole article is a pseudo-evolutionary comparison, in Sahlins' terminology, between Polynesian polities and the 'underdeveloped' Melanesian ones (Hau'ofa 1975: 285)." 1 In the context of 1 The antagonism between these two great thinkers would fade, however, to change two decades later, as Tomlinson noted, into a perfect convergence with the respective publication of the essays Our Sea of Islands for Hau'ofa (1993) and The Economics of Develop-Man in the Pacific for Sahlins (1992): "Both authors share the core idea that there is a grounded set of values, practices, and interrelationships that enables Oceanic expansion. This expansion can be manifest as grander public adherence to tradition.