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

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter UHP eBook Package 2000-2013
• MitwirkendeR: Carucci, Laurence Marshall,; Dalton, Doug,; Dening, Greg,; Dureau, Christine,; Mageo, Jeannette Marie,; Mageo, Marie,; Morton, Helen,; Rodman, Margaret Critchlow,; Stillman, Amy Ku'uleialoha,
• HerausgeberIn: Mageo, Jeannette Marie,
• Place / Publishing House: Honolulu : : University of Hawaii Press, , [2001]; ©2001
• Year of Publication: 2001
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (228 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. On Memory Genres: Tendencies in Cultural Remembering -- I. Recollecting Cultural History and Identity -- Chapter 2. Remembering Freedom and the Freedom to Remember: Tongan Memories of Independence -- Chapter 3. The Third Meaning in Cultural Memory: History, Identity, and Spirit Possession in Samoa Jeannette -- Chapter 4. Elision or Decision: Lived History and the Contextual Grounding of the Constructed Past -- II. Positionality, Ambiguity, and Ambivalence -- Chapter 5. Memory, Power, and Loss in Rawa Discourse -- Chapter 6. Recounting and Remembering "First Contact" on Simbo -- Chapter 7. Memory and Conviction: Colonial Tales of Prisoners in the New Hebrides -- III. Colonial Continuities/Discontinuities III. in Cultural Memory -- Chapter 8. Re-Membering the History of the Hawaiian Hula -- Chapter 9. Afterword: On the Befores and Afters of the Encounter -- Contributors -- Index