Boas argued that anthropologists should make historical comparisons within well-defined regional contexts. A century later, we have many improvements in the statistical methodologies for comparative research, yet most of our regional constructs remain without a valid empirical basis. We present a new method for developing and testing regions. The method takes into account older anthropological concerns with relationships between culture history and the environment, embodied in the culture-area concept, as well as contemporary concerns with historical linkages of societies into world systems. We develop nine new regions based on social structural data and test them using data on 35 I societies. We compare the new regions with Murdock's regional constructs and find that our regional classification is a strong improvement over Murdock's. In so doiig we obtain evidence for the cross-cultural importance of gender and descent systems, for the importance of constraint relationships upon sociocultural systems, for the historical importance of two precapitalist world systems, and for strikingly different geographical alignments of cultural systems in the Old World and the Americas.
Both anthropologists and ethnic nationalists use the concept of tradition to define a cultural identity. While both view the rural community as representative of an authentic inheritance, the attempts by nationalists to discover this heritage usually produce cultural creations. The Hawaiian cultural revival advances an eclectic version of tradition, modeled partly on the lifestyle of rural Hawaiians. This paper argues that tradition is inevitably invented because it enters into the construction of social identity. Even for the rural “folk,” tradition is self‐conscious and changing. [tradition, ethnicity, nationalism, symbolic anthropology, Polynesia, Hawaii]
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In a sophisticated contribution to the literature on the symbolic construction of culture, Allan Hanson (1989) has demonstrated that key tropes in Maori oral tradition were authored by European scholars working to further a now-discredited theoretical paradigm. The essay has generated considerable controversy in New Zealand and within anthropology generally. The reaction to Hanson's piece raises troubling questions about the public representation and political implications of anthropological work, and the issue of authenticity appears to be the crux of the problem. This commentary attempts to clarify the ethical dilemma raised by anthropological discourse about the invention of culture, and to raise the question of resolution.Both within anthropology and among critics outside the discipline there is a pervasive suspicion that the invention of culture is a politically revisionist and anti-native rubric, if not in the explicit statements of particular scholars, then in its implications. The concern, at times phrased as an accusation, is that writing about the contemporary construction or "invention" of culture undercuts the cultural authority of indigenous peoples by calling into question their authenticity. Implicitly, authenticity is thus equated with the transmission through time of a tradition, that is, an objectively definable essence or core of customs and beliefs (Handler 1986;Handler and Linnekin 1984). The ethically problematic aspect, I suggest, is the way the thesis of cultural invention is portrayed and understood outside anthropology. However effectively scholars deconstruct authenticity and reveal it to be an intellectual red herring, the concept remains nonetheless entrenched in popular thought and is an emotional, political issue for indigenous peoples, particularly for those who are engaged in a struggle for sovereignty.Hanson's essay was the subject of a perceptive piece about modern anthropology in the New York Times (Wilford 1990), but in New Zealand the reportage focused on the article's implications for Maori, and emphasized the conclusion that Maori culture is invented (see Freeth 1990; Nissen 1990). T h e N e w York T i m s writer acknowledged Maori anger over the notion of invented tradition but portrayed the controversy as raising questions that "strike a t the very heart of anthropology"
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