The Inversion of Tradition

sense in which certain features of a society or culture are important5 and will therefore be prominent in objectifications of that society or culture; rather, the process of choosing emThe extensive literature on inventions of tradition and identity in the Pacific has dealt mostly with reifications that are positively upheld by the people under consideration. This article traces some changes in cultural objectifications over various phases of the encounter between islanders and colonizers, examining the ways in which the recognition of both others and selves made particular practices and customs emblematic of whole ways of life. The fact that these generalized constructions of customary ways can be negated as well as affirmed may have broad ramifications for the ways anthropologists think about culture. [tradition, identity, invention, colonialism, Pacific Islands] the inversion of tradition 213 blematic activities, dispositions, or material artifacts is indissociable from a history of encounters and from what is at issue in those particular encounters. Hence I aim here not to review the diverse developments in the literature on tradition and identity but to draw these terms into a broad analysis of cultural objectification;6 I stress that cultural objectification is often a reactive process, and seek also to draw attention to a neglected dimension of the reifications of custom, indigenous ways, and tradition that have now been examined in such diverse contexts-from pagan enclaves in the otherwise Christian nations of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to assertions of minority identity in Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii. Despite the diversity of lines of interpretation, it has almost always been tacitly assumed that the people concerned have a positive attitude toward the reifications of indigenous tradition or custom that they present. That is, because emphasis has been placed on the role of such constructions in the affirmation or assertion of local identity, negative and ambivalent attitudes toward the customary or the traditional have remained largely invisible. For instance, Handler suggests that to meet the challenge of an outsider's denial of national existence, nationalists must claim and specify the nation's possessions: they must delineate and if possible secure a bounded territory, and they must construct an account of the unique culture and history that attaches to and emanates from the people who occupy it. 11985:211 The informing idea of many specific studies in the Pacific is similar: that political contest and affirmation have required an elaboration of identity. I do not dispute the correctness or the importance of this departure point, but it also seems crucial to recognize political contest within a national (or tribal) population, contest that is manifest not only in the process of selecting aspects of past heritage or present custom that are to be privileged in the construction of ethnic identity, but also in radical rejections of what is local and traditional. Once the scope of such valorizations has been recognized, their political and cultural significance seems considerable, both in apparently routine circumstances and in the politico-religious movements that have been of such interest to Pacific anthropologists and historians. My main point, then, is a very simple one: that if a set of meanings is objectified and named-as the custom of the place, or the Samoan way, for example-then it is possible to take a variety of stances toward that reifi-