Cultural Memory : Reconfiguring History and Identity in the Postcolonial Pacific / Jeannette Marie Mageo.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Mageo, Jeannette Marie, 1947- editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Oceania--Ethnic relations.

Oceania.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press, [2001]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

How do foreign schemas and objects enter into indigenous ways of understanding the world? How are the cultural self and the cultural other constructed in acts of remembering? What is memory's role in the generation or degeneration of cultural meanings? In contemporary Pacific societies these questions are not merely the subject of scholarly debate but speak to pressing life concerns. This volume offers fruitful responses to such questions, providing insights into colonial memory and its limitations and proposing explanations that illumine cultural memory processes. These processes, in turn, elucidate ways of authoring cultural history and shed light on cultural identity, which, like other forms of identity, is built from a remembered self. Contributors explore valorizations of certain aspects of the remembered past, amnesias about other aspects. Both are part of the rhetoric of colonizing cultures and of cultural identity and nationhood in many contemporary Pacific societies. The provocative analyses and responses offered here are both academic and personal: close engagement with individuals and their ways of life is evident. These are at once intellectual journeys through the colonial landscapes of Pacific memory and attempts to understand the problems of politics and personhood, cultural identity and meaning, for real people in real places. Cultural Memory confronts many of the most central anthropological issues of our time.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. On Memory Genres: Tendencies in Cultural Remembering / Mageo, Jeannette Marie

I. Recollecting Cultural History and Identity

Chapter 2. Remembering Freedom and the Freedom to Remember: Tongan Memories of Independence / Morton, Helen

Chapter 3. The Third Meaning in Cultural Memory: History, Identity, and Spirit Possession in Samoa Jeannette / Mageo, Marie

Chapter 4. Elision or Decision: Lived History and the Contextual Grounding of the Constructed Past / Carucci, Laurence Marshall

II. Positionality, Ambiguity, and Ambivalence

Chapter 5. Memory, Power, and Loss in Rawa Discourse / Dalton, Doug

Chapter 6. Recounting and Remembering "First Contact" on Simbo / Dureau, Christine

Chapter 7. Memory and Conviction: Colonial Tales of Prisoners in the New Hebrides / Rodman, Margaret Critchlow

III. Colonial Continuities/Discontinuities III. in Cultural Memory

Chapter 8. Re-Membering the History of the Hawaiian Hula / Stillman, Amy Ku'uleialoha

Chapter 9. Afterword: On the Befores and Afters of the Encounter / Dening, Greg

Contributors

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 28. Aug 2019)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780824841874

0824841875

OCLC:

1013955628