Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Indigenous essentialism? ‘Simplifying’ customary land ownership in New Georgia, Solomon Islands

1993; Brill; Volume: 149; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1163/22134379-90003114

2213-4379

Edvard Hviding,

Indigenous Studies and Ecology

Recent 'anti-essentialist' views in anthropology hold that socio-cultural phenomena have been studied with an exaggerated emphasis on patterns and order and cultural uniformity, thereby obscuring diversity, flux and variability (Vayda 1990).Such views have influenced a number of contemporary anthropological studies which duly emphasize dynamic cultural creativity on the local level (e.g.Borofsky 1987;Barth 1987).Indeed, some commentators see variation itself, and not order or degrees of normative consensus, as the main object of study (Rosaldo 1988). 1 Another important recent field of inquiry focuses on the active reconstitution or 'construction' of 'tradition' in the Pacific, particularly in colonial and post-colonial discourse and rhetoric.It has been commonly argued that the 'politics of tradition' in many Pacific Island societies (and elsewhere) tend to involve a certain level of reification or 'objectification'. 2 From this it may be inferred that an 'essentialization' of ' EDVARD HVIDING received his PhD in 1993 from the University of Bergen, where he is now Associate Professor of Social Anthropology.Since 1986 he has carried out 27 months of field research in the Solomon Islands.He has also been involved in applied research on fisheries and aquaculture development for regional organizations in the South Pacific.