Commentaries Negotiating Globalization: Contemporary Pacific Perspectives
نویسنده
چکیده
We can hold as self-evident at least one truth about globalization, past or present. People everywhere meet what comes to them over the horizon with neither passive acceptance nor heroic resistance. This unhappy and limited choice—like the unmediated opposition between ‘‘the local/ indigenous’’ and ‘‘the global/foreign’’—is a consequence of bipolar theory rather than ethnographic and historical inquiry. So the articles gathered here forcefully demonstrate. Pacific Islanders now seek and have long sought to establish a range of relationships with agents and agencies deemed foreign. Relationship is the key term; the transformative engagement of the foreign by the domestic is above all oriented toward generating a productive and reciprocal relationship. Such relationships have assumed multiple shapes of varying symmetry, including ones in which neither side concedes its autonomy and both sides achieve their aspirations—a durable relationship between sovereign partners; ones in which each side accommodates the other from their proper positions within an encompassing hierarchy; and ones in which both sides merge or incorporate to form new conditions for social existence. Phrasing the matter in this slightly legalistic way signals the central issue addressed by all of the articles in this volume, namely, the ongoing encounter of Pacific Islanders with a particular political economy and jural cosmology—with ideals and practices of capitalist markets, property rights, and land tenure as well as of nation-states, democratic representation, and personal and collective self-determination. Given the important emphasis of these articles on politicolegal processes, it is useful if not unproblematic to consider this encounter as a protracted negotiation.More
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