Reassessing Revitalization Movements

Peter Schenzel (Univ. Halle) 4972 2002 Dec 03 11:16:08

Description

The escalating political, economic, and cultural colonization of indigenous peoples over the past few centuries has spawned a multitude of revitalization movements. These movements promise liberation from domination by outsiders and incorporate and rework elements of traditional culture. Reassessing Revitalization Movements is the first book to discuss and compare in detail the origins, structure, and development of religious and political revitalization movements in North America and the Pacific Islands (known as Oceania). The essays cover the twentieth-century Cargo Cults of the South Pacific, the 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dance movements in western North America, the Tuka Movement on Fiji in 1885, as well as the revitalistic aspects of contemporary social movements in North American and Oceania.

Reassessing Revitalization Movements takes Anthony F. C. Wallace’s concept of revitalization movements and examines the applicability of the model to a variety of religious and anticolonial movements in North America and the Pacific Islands. This extension of the revitalization movement model beyond its traditional territory in Native anthropology enriches our understanding of movements outside of North America and offers a holistic view of them that embraces phenomena ranging from the psychic to the ecological. This cross-cultural approach provides the most stimulating and broadly applicable treatment of the topic in decades.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• América del Norte
• Indigenous peoples
• North America
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Nebraska Paperback
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780803203884
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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reassessing revitalization movements

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Edited by Michael E. Harkin

reassessing revitalization movements

Perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands

university of nebraska press lincoln and london

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The publication of this book was supported by funds provided by the Research Office and the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Wyoming. ©2004by the University of Nebraska Press “Visions of Revitalization in the Eastern Woodlands” ©2004by Joel Martin All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reassessing revitalization movements: perspectives from North America and the Pacific Islands / edited by Michael E. Harkin. p. cm. Based on an invited session at the98th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8032-2406-0(cl.: alk. paper) 1. Nativistic movements—Congresses. 2. Nativistic movements—North America—Congresses. 3. Nativistic movements—Pacific Area—Congresses. I. Harkin, Michael Eugene,1958– II. American Anthropological Association. Meeting (98th:1999: Chicago, Ill.) gn472.7.r4 2004 306.6'99—dc22 2003016609

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Contents

forewordvii Anthony F. C. Wallace acknowledgmentsxiii introduction Revitalization as History and Theory xv Michael E. Harkin 1.indian revolts and cargo cults Ritual Violence and Revitalization in California and New Guinea1 Maria Lepowsky 2.visions of revitalization in the eastern woodlands Can a Middle-Aged Theory Stretch to Embrace the First Cherokee Converts?61 Joel W. Martin 3.priests and prophets The Politics of Voice in the Pacific88 Jukka Siikala 4.the wasitay religion Prophecy, Oral Literacy, and Belief on Hudson Bay Jennifer S. H. Brown 5.124revitalization in wartime micronesia Lin Poyer 6.revitalization as catharsis The Warm House Cult of Western Oregon143 Michael E. Harkin 7.the evolution of revitalization movements among the yangoru boiken, papua new guinea 162 Paul B. Roscoe

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contents

8.recontextualizing revitalization Cosmology and Cultural Stability in the Adoption of Peyotism among the Yuchi183 Jason Baird Jackson 9.new life for whom? TheScopeoftheTropeinMarshallIslandsKu¯rijm¯oj206 Laurence Marshall Carucci 10. OGITCHIDA at WASWAAGANING Conflict in the Revitalization of Lac du Flambeau Anishinaabe Identity225 Larry Nesper 11.expressions of identity in tahiti 247 Lisa Henry 12.“canny about conflict” Nativism, Revitalization, and the Invention of Tradition in Native Southeastern New England261 Ann McMullen references cited 279 list of contributors 329 index 333

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foreword Anthony F. C. Wallace

My original article, “Revitalization Movements,” appeared in theAmer- ican Anthropologistin1956. It was an early outgrowth of research for a biographical study of the19th-century Seneca prophet Handsome Lake. As that project evolved, it became less exclusively a life and times work comparable to my earlier Native American biography,Teedyus- cung: King of the Delawares(1949), and more a type case for a special kind of social movement. Such events of cultural reform seemed to be extraordinarily widespread, a pancultural phenomenon, recognizable both in small-scale societies on the colonial fringes of great empires and also in the heart of the larger polities themselves. The Handsome Lake study itself, however, did not see print until1970with the pub- lication ofThe Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, and unfortunately the original theoretical essay was not printed as an appendix to that vol- ume. Nevertheless, the Handsome Lake book has enjoyed consider- able popularity, particularly among historians, who have in recent years entered the field of American Indian ethnohistory in increasing num- bers. By now the expression “revitalization movement” has been some- what routinized and is sometimes used as a generic term without ref- erence to its source, and the concept has been applied in contexts far removed from the situations mentioned as illustrations in the original article. Perhaps the most flattering of its most recent uses is in a doctoral dissertation by Wesley Peach, submitted to the faculty of theology of the University of Montreal, and published in2001in the series Perspectives de theologies pratique, under the titleItineraires de Conversion(2001). This work presents pathways to successful conversion to Christianity, illustrated by a dozen case histories from Quebec, analyzed in the light of revitalization theory. My writings on revitalization are accurately

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wallace

described in detail and are considered as a kind of pastoral model for Catholic and Protestant evangelical programs. That the theory is rec- ommended for use by professional practitioners of conversion I take to be an ultimate testimonial to its validity in the world outside academe! But the accolade calls for a certain caution: When does description be- come prescription? When does prophecy theory become self-fulfilling prophecy itself? The thoughtful introduction by Michael E. Harkin and the descrip- tive chapters in the present book provide a welcome comparative per- spective on the domain of revitalization as they test its usefulness in a number of empirical studies of Native American and Oceanian move- ments. These applications raise significant issues with respect to the nature of the theory itself. Rather than comment on these excellent contributions individually, let me mention briefly a few of the larger issues of reassessment raised by the several authors. Of particular interest to me are the possibilities of modifying the structure of revitalization theory itself that are suggested by some of the chapters in this book. At the time of my original writing, in the 1950s and1960s, interdisciplinary research was in vogue, and concepts of “stress” and “equilibrium” were being widely applied to unite bio- logical, psychological, and social domains of inquiry under the rubric of “systems theory.” The model articulated in the1956article makes use of an organismic analogy and proposes revitalization movements as a process of equilibrium restoration that may be applied to any society, whatever the source of the failure of harmony and the rise of anomie. But it is rather abstract and perhaps fails to attend sufficiently to the unique texture of cultural and historical circumstances of the kind that fills the pages of the Seneca book. The suggestion of using chaos theory as an enrichment of the model in order to take account of the uniqueness of original events and conditions as determining the timing of revi- talization events, the content of the prophetic code, the course of the movement and its impact on the surrounding society, and so on strikes me as promising. One of the virtues of postmodern ethnography (and ethnohistory) is its appreciation of the singularities of human experi- ence. Generality and singularity are a dialectic that inevitably generates art—and anthropology. As Blake has observed, it is the task not only of the scientist but also of the poet to discern the universal in the particular:

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To see the world in a grain of sand And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in a hour.

foreword

ix

Another question that these chapters raise, or imply, is whether the revitalization model is applicable only to those situations of colonial- ism in which a subordinate group is impelled to reform its way of life in reaction to pressures imposed by a dominant power. Such reforms may, as several chapters suggest, not go in the direction of nativism or withdrawal and may take the form of conversion to the religion of the oppressor. This model is congenial to a postmodern scholarly environ- ment, invoking hegemonic Power and the oppressed Other. Classic ex- amples of revitalization, such as the Ghost Dance, the Vailala Madness, and the New Religion of Handsome Lake, fit easily into the imperialist, colonialist mold. And it would seem to be ever more relevant as the tide of globalization washes over the world, producing neocolonial situations in which “emergent nativisms” (to use my colleague Robert Grumet’s phrase) flourish in revitalistic response. But I would like to see an exploration of a supplement to the colo- nialist hypothesis: that revitalization does not merely occur among the fringe peoples of the world but, in fact, happens in the belly of the beast as well. As Harkin suggests, and as Weston La Barre, inThe Ghost Dance, and others have shown, the colonialist hypothesis may not be adequate; revitalization may apply to larger, even imperial polities. The model here is the notion, developed by several philosophers of history, particularly by Hegel and his Marxist heirs but also in simpler form by Toynbee, Alfred L. Kroeber, and others, that each “civilization” (or “culture area”) follows a life cycle of birth, florescence, and decline as a result of inner dynamics, of potentialities and vulnerabilities inherent in the system itself. In the case of Marxist theory, the inner dynamic is the economic and political struggle between classes in the course of cultural evolution, and in this model revitalization movements may appear as primitive rebellions of the lower classes or counterrevolutionary con- spiracies of defeated elites. Thus the Taiping Rebellion in19th-century China—a massive and bloody revolt against the Manchu regime, led by a semi-Christianized prophet and suppressed with the aid of European mercenaries—can be seen not merely as an acculturationist revitaliza- tion movement but also (by Chinese scholars) as a premature peasant

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