IN A LECTURE SIGNIFICANTLY ENTITLED “OTHER TIMES, Other Customs: The Anthropology of History,” Marshall Sahlins evoked Jean-Paul Sartre’s question of whether we are yet able “to constitute a structural, historical anthropology.” Sahlins’s response was unequivocal: “Yes, I have tried to suggest here, le jour est arrivé” (in French in Sahlins). In other words, the day had dawned when one could “explode the concept of history through the anthropological experience of culture.”1 Taking my cue from this, I will start with this anthropological experience of culture, guided by Sahlins, whose lecture sought to bring that “day” into being, or at least see it break, with all the promises it held. What interests me here is the anticipated or desired explosion of the concept of history, and with it the assertion that “the heretofore obscure histories of remote islands deserve a place alongside the self-contemplation of the European past.”2 And not only as parallel histories, but as a contribution from the margins to our thinking about history and historical time.
That was in 1982, which was—already—another time, if not other customs. What were the issues back then? Sahlins had developed his historical anthropology on the basis of the ethnographic, historical, and archival work he had carried out on the distant islands of the Pacific Ocean. Over the years, his fieldwork and tireless archival research had made these islands into something to be reckoned with in any work on anthropology and history, and particularly on forms of history. Hawaii was particularly important for him, and especially the emblematic figure of Captain Cook (whose twofold apotheosis Sahlins describes).3 Time and again, in article after article—and supplement after supplement—this Sherlock Holmes of the South Pacific called his historian and anthropologist colleagues to account,4 with a Supplement to the Voyage of Cook and even eventually a Supplement to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind,5 whose thought had initially so inspired him. Sahlins’s body of work marked the beginning of another time, which sought to consecrate at long last the marriage of structural method and history through a structuralism informed by language pragmatics. The first imperative was to undo the plethora of false binary oppositions structuralism had spawned, and particularly the opposition of history and structure, for which Sahlins proposed the alternative of “structure of the conjuncture.”6
What were the influences on Sahlins? In 1960 Lévi-Strauss had made a distinction between “cold” and “hot” societies. It met with immediate success, but was also the object of fierce debate and to this day is poorly understood.7 “Cold” societies border on “the zero [of] historical temperature” and seem to be predominantly concerned with “preserving their existence.” “Hot” societies, on the other hand, exist at a higher temperature or, more precisely, experience internal differences in temperature within the system, from which they “extract change and energy.” They “interiorize history, as it were, and turn it into the motive power of their development.”8 Such are, preeminently, European societies. Lévi-Strauss’s metaphors are clearly drawn from the model of the steam or internal combustion engine, even though, as we have seen, he attributed the first period of “warming up” to the Neolithic revolution, of which the Industrial Revolution was but a distant copy.
Importantly, when Lévi-Strauss returned to this distinction some twenty years later, he stressed that it should be taken for what it was, namely, a model. His aim in presenting two states which, like the state of nature in Rousseau “do not exist, have never existed, and will never exist,” and yet which must be “[understood] correctly,” was above all “heuristic.” “All societies,” he went on,
are equally historical, but some of them admit it openly whereas others resist the idea and prefer to ignore it. So if we can legitimately place societies on an ideal scale not according to their degree of historicity, which is the same for all, but according to the way they experience it, it is important to identify and analyze the borderline cases: under what conditions and in what forms does a community’s way of thinking and the individuals who constitute it open up to the idea of history? When and how do they come to view it as a tool by means of which they can act on the present and transform it, rather than as a disorder and a threat?9
In Lévi-Strauss’s terms, one could say that all societies have the same degree of historicity, but that “the subjective image they have of themselves” and “the way they experience it” vary. Their awareness of history and the uses they put it to are not the same. That is, societies differ in their modes of historical consciousness, and their ways of living, thinking, and exploiting it, in other words, in the ways they articulate past, present, and future. It is their regimes of historicity, therefore, which differ.
Later still, in 1998, Lévi-Strauss again felt obliged to clarify his position, which was still being misunderstood. He again stressed the point that at issue were only a society’s “subjective” attitudes toward history, which is why “if it is not our history, we fail to perceive them.” He then made a new point, which reflected the decade of the 1990s: “I have been wondering, as this century draws to a close, whether there are not perceptible signs that our own societies are cooling down.” He went on to explain:
Our societies, which are the perpetrators or victims of such ghastly tragedies, which are frightened by the consequences of demographic expansion, of wars and other scourges, have rediscovered an attachment to heritage and the importance of roots…, which is their way of living the illusion, as it is for other countries which feel under threat, that they can—symbolically only, of course—move against the course of history and suspend time.10
For Lévi-Strauss, “cooling down” was thus another name for the crisis of the future.
Yet Lévi-Strauss had not always approached history through this kind of subjective comparison of historicities. In his original article on ethnology and history, published in 1949, his argument had taken a different turn, and centered on each discipline’s relation to the object. The two disciplines differed, in his view, not in the nature of their object, aim, or method, but solely in the perspective adopted, since “history organizes its data in relation to conscious expressions of social life, while anthropology proceeds by examining its unconscious foundations.”11 Historicity, or rather its different modes, was not Lévi-Strauss’s main concern at this point.
In 1952, however, when commissioned by UNESCO to write Race and History, he could no longer ignore the issue, but he chose a different focus.12 As we saw in the prior chapter, in order to establish the idea of the diversity of cultures, he introduced the notions of “stationary” and “cumulative” history, while immediately adding that the processes of accumulation were neither continuous nor the privilege of a single civilization, and that the difference between “stationary” and “cumulative” history was a function of the observer’s viewpoint, such that phenomena that seemed to the observer to be developing in the same direction as his or her civilization tended to be regarded as “cumulative,” whereas those which lay outside the civilization’s frame of reference, as “stationary.” If we reckon with the “ethnocentric point of view which we always adopt in assessing the value of a different culture,” then historicity, “or, to use a more accurate term, [a culture’s] eventfulness, thus depends not on its intrinsic qualities but on our situation with regard to it and on the number and variety of our interests involved.”13 Or, in another wording, “the contrast between progressive and stagnant cultures would thus appear to result, in the first place, from a difference of focus.”14
This conclusion prompted Lévi-Strauss to call for a general theory of relativity that could embrace both the physical and the social sciences. Race and History was a wide-ranging meditation on the diversity of cultures, published at a time when a global civilization was appearing for the first time. He stressed the “fact” of diversity, but the analysis of different cultures’ forms or regimes of historicity evidently lay beyond the book’s scope. Nevertheless, he gestured toward these ideas through ill-fitting notions such as “eventfulness,” which is dependent upon a culture’s “intrinsic qualities.” With hindsight, we can interpret this slightly hesitant or clumsy vocabulary as the sign of a difficulty in defining what was being referred to. But no precise terms seemed available, and historians certainly had nothing better to offer. With Race and History, Lévi-Strauss had established a framework or, better, opened up an approach based on the idea of relativity.15 It was, after all, the era of decolonization.
In the very same year, 1952, and likewise exploring the notion of historicity, Claude Lefort’s somewhat overlooked article “Société ‘sans histoire’ et historicité” (“Societies ‘without history’ and historicity”) also broke new ground. It went back to Hegel’s great divide between societies with and without history, and tried to move beyond it by placing the question of historicity squarely in the center.16 “What is proper to historical societies,” Lefort maintained, “is that they contain the principle of the event within themselves and have the capacity to convert it into the dimension of an experience, such that it may figure as an element in an on-going debate.”17 When Lefort referred to an “event,” he clearly had in mind an event like the French Revolution, whereas Lévi-Strauss in his speculations on the emergence of “hot” societies was thinking, rather, of the Neolithic revolution. The time—and temperature!—scales were clearly not the same. For Lefort, “historical” societies were based on the “principle of the event,” whereas the principle of “primitive” societies had yet to be defined. Far from separating the two or treating them as opposites, Lefort wanted to make them comparable, precisely by “distinguishing two modes of historicity.” His introduction of the notions of “principle” (the principle of the event) and of “modes of historicity” provided a way out of the vagueness of the historical categories used hitherto, and enabled the question of forms of historicity to be addressed more subtly.
Lefort’s question was thus: “How does primitive society close off its own future, how does it develop without being aware that it is changing and, as it were, establish itself in view of its own replication?” In short, what is its historical principle, “what genre of historicity” does it have, “by which we mean the general relation which people entertain with the past and the future”?18 This was a definition of historicity we could already work with, except for the omission of any explicit consideration of the present. Although Lefort was well-read in anthropology, he wrote as a philosopher, mindful of preserving differences without reducing them to a lack that would reactivate the old Hegelian divide between societies with and without history. Exploring this “genre of historicity” further, through fieldwork, lay beyond Lefort’s scope.
This is where Marshall Sahlins came in. Although with Sahlins the key issue—the type of historicity—remained unchanged, the terms used to address it were no longer the same. Structuralism had left its mark, first on anthropology, and then on the study of history.19 It was something one supported, opposed, or wanted to improve. The whole field of the humanities and social sciences was bristling with binary oppositions, not least myth and history, which would be the object of fierce debate, along with event and structure. The terms of the discussion were to change yet again, with the various moves out of structuralism. But let us simply explore for the moment the context of Sahlins’s work, its methods, and its concerns.
Sahlins starts by transporting his reader to Fiji. Through a series of micro-analyses he depicts how the history, or rather mode of historical consciousness, of these islands is experienced, constructed, and narrated. In a short introduction, he reminds the reader that Western history itself has a history and that its modern forms, concerned with quantifiable data, cycles, and structures, are inseparable from the forms of our modernity. But this word of caution, which seems so very obvious to us today, is immediately overlaid or relativized by another one, to the effect that a history in which numerical importance and the idea of collective values counted emerged long before the market economy and modern democracies. For with the rise of the Greek city-state (for which Sahlins refers to Jean-Pierre Vernant’s Origins of Greek Thought20), a new history had gained currency in which the agora replaced the royal palace and the majority principle won out over the appropriation of power by a single person. In other words, in ancient Greece, a new mode of historical existence had arisen, as well as a new historical consciousness (which would soon lead to this history being written down, becoming what the Western tradition would thereafter precisely call “History”).21
Sahlins’s double detour, however schematic or approximate it may appear, had the propaedeutic virtue of injecting a dose of relativism into Western observers, prompting them from the outset to question their own traditions: “Other times, other customs,” to be sure, but also other histories. However, these histories were not like the islands on which Odysseus set foot, self-enclosed and scattered across the vast ocean, such that no historian’s or anthropologist’s craft could ever reach them or relate them to each other. On the contrary, Sahlins was adamant that a comparable structure implied a comparable historicity, by which he clearly wished to intervene in the debate on the divine nature of kingship precisely in terms of its specific mode of historicity, which he called “heroic.” Sahlins’s analysis thus never loses sight of a broader comparative dimension. At this point, in order to arrest the giddying movement of the term “history,” which Sahlins uses in a different sense every time, let us at least provisionally call the mode of historical existence Sahlins describes the “heroic regime of historicity.”
FOR SAHLINS, HEROIC HISTORY’S THEORIZATION DESCRIBES AN arc in time with, at one end, Giambattista Vico (the heroic age, situated between those of the gods and of men), and, at the other end, Louis Dumont and his concept of hierarchy, with Frazer’s and Hocart’s analyses of archaic royalty in between. Since the king is the very condition of possibility of the society, it follows that “if I eat, it is the King; if I sleep, it is the King; if I drink, it is the King,” as everyday parlance has it. Here “history is anthropomorphic in principle, which is to say in structure.”22 It is like Fenimore Cooper’s Mohicans walking in single file, one behind the other, giving the impression of being just one giant Indian. A historiography based on sampling and statistics cannot but miss the mark, since this is not a world in which “Every man counts as ‘one’ (vote),” but rather a world in which “one alone counts”: this would be the first rule of “heroic statistics.” In Fiji, for example, Christianity was long referred to as “the religion of Thakombau,” Thakombau being the leader of the main Fijian federation. Although in 1852 a missionary survey registered only 850 converts, once Thakombau had declared his allegiance to the Christian God, in 1854, there suddenly appeared the admirable figure of 8,870—from which it can be deduced that 8,870–850 = 1, with Thakombau making up the statistical difference.23 Although quantitative historical research might still have been fair game at the beginning of the 1980s, the charge still seems a little facile; after all, not all historians walked in single file like those Mohicans.…But let us get back to Sahlins.
There is more to say about this adoption of Christianity: the circumstances of the conversion must also be taken into account. Acknowledging the truth of Christianity is one thing, and conversion is another, for, as Thakombau said to a missionary, “everything is true that comes from the white man’s country; muskets and gunpowder are true, and your religion must be true.”24 The extra-ordinary presence of Europeans was a “total social fact” for the Fijians, inseparably religious, political, and economic. So why did they not convert immediately? Because the population waited for a cue from its chiefs, each chief watched the next, and the last chief waited for the right moment. That is exactly what Thakombau did, encountering “the true God” at a time when he had suffered serious military setbacks. In opting to convert to Christianity, he made it impossible for his enemies to do likewise, while at the same time securing the assistance of missionaries and the support of the king of Tonga, who was already a Christian. In short, he won—and “was saved.” Could we not see in Thakombau a distant cousin of Constantine?
It should be added that the sudden death of the enemy chief in the preceding weeks left the enemy coalition in total disarray. But one way or another, the Fijians became Christian by fighting, as they were obliged to, for their chief and for Christianity, that is, for “the religion of Thakombau.” Heroic history really is a history of kings and battles, but only because in that particular culture the social system is an echo chamber for the actions of the king, which consequently have “a disproportionate historical effect.”25 It is a history which, structurally, “produces great men” and seems, at first sight, to oscillate between the stroke of genius (conversion) and the stroke of (good) fortune (the sudden death of Thakombau’s opponent). These sudden reversals are precisely one of its characteristics.
One could point out in passing that the world of Plutarch’s Lives functioned in a similar way, with human destiny being woven out of an ongoing confrontation between Tukhe (Fortune) and Arete (Excellence).26 Reversals of fortune—or peripeties, to give them their Greek name—also organized the lives of the heroes of antiquity. Moreover, the notion of peripety comes from Greek tragedy, which is not to suggest that such lives were in themselves tragic, but that the tragic schema can enable a person’s life be understood and narrated in the form of one of the Lives. It should be said that Sahlins was not very forthcoming about the origins or construction of the categories he employed in his heroic history.
Be that as it may, Sahlins’s heroic regime should prompt us to question the separation we blithely make between ritual and history. When a king dies, there ensues a period of chaos we call ritual, until the heir reinstates the taboos and restores order on all levels. However, when an army suddenly loses its leader, breaks ranks, and scatters, we talk of a battle and a defeat. In so doing we are insidiously introducing our own distinctions as to what is real and what is symbolic, what is history (history as kings, queens, and battles) and what is ritual. Yet, says Sahlins, these two moments of collapse are essentially the same, and both confirm the same hierarchical system.
Of course, heroic history is not simply borne on the breeze. It is subtended by a number of “social forms.” These are “a system of heroic segmentation” (which, for Sahlins, develops from top to bottom, unlike the classical lineage system, which develops from the bottom up), with at its pinnacle “the privileges of authority,” which take precedence over the “principles of descent”; a “solidarity” which is less “mechanical” or “organic” than “hierarchical”; forms of succession and kinship systems; a sort of “division of labor as regards historical consciousness”; and “annals” filled with byzantine intrigues punctuated by fratricides and parricides.
The king’s actions are the temporal yardstick: the royal traditions, whose experts cleverly manipulate cultural categories, function as reference points and even as history for the elite. Researchers investigating how the king’s subjects fitted into this general framework often observed that when asked about “custom” or “history,” the subjects were unable to answer, as though they had not yet attained historical consciousness. But, Sahlins argues, their culture is above all something they experience; it is part of their habitus. Also, they express their knowledge and grasp of cultural codes differently, not through lengthy genealogies, cosmic myths, and royal legends, but through items of news exchanged, and all the little stories (and tales) one tells and is told—obeying certain rules, of course—about different people, relatives, and acquaintances. These are the ordinary annals of the poor.
The king alone can proclaim heroic history, but instead of the “royal we” familiar to Europeans, there is a “heroic I.” This “I” is “even more radical,” however, because it implies not only the speaker but also those no longer living, the past generations who “weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”27 “‘I’ have done” can thus mean “this was performed by an ancestor, who died long before I was born.” If one can say that every cultural order has its own historicity, or even its own regime of historicity, then Fiji can be said to represent “the paradigm of heroic history.” It comes complete with its conditions of possibility, and its forms of “historical consciousness,” divided between the “annals of the poor,” which are to do with habitus and “talk story,” and its “heroic annals,” which are a combination of myth and history or, more precisely, “explicitly organize historical action as the projection of mythical relations.”28
After characterizing the nature of the heroic regime, as though in reply to Lefort’s question on primitive societies’ operative “principle,” Sahlins turns to the relations between myth and event. Again, he starts with a reference to the Greeks, returning to his recurrent comparison of the “Savages” with the “Ancients,” and citing Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides declares in the book’s opening pages that he intends to eliminate any trace of muthos from his account (pejoratively calling it muthôdes, a sort of poetic exaggeration, as alluring as it is empty). In so doing, he says, he seeks to ensure that the work may be “profitable” to those who, now and in the future, wish to understand the present time and its crises.29 After Thucydides, history would thus involve pursuing and examining the truth of what had occurred. At this point Sahlins shifts again, not back to the Greeks this time, but over to the Maori. Now it so happened, says Sahlins, that when the new governor, Sir George Grey, took up office in 1844, he landed in the midst of a Maori uprising. In order to understand what people around him were talking about, and above all, what on earth was going on, he had been obliged, he explained, to set about gathering and deciphering indigenous myths and proverbs. The moral of the story was that it was impossible to write a history of the Polynesian wars without including precisely what the history of the Peloponnesian war excluded from the outset, namely muthos: no history without muthos, but at the same time no “true” history with it. Sahlins simply reveled in this dissonance. It should be pointed out, however, that Thucydides was native to the culture, whereas Sir George was not, and that in order to break with the myths of the tribe one has first to know them!
The Maori think that “the future [is] behind them.”30 The past is a vast reservoir of models of action, from which the mythical tradition which best gives form and expression to the concrete “interests” of the moment is skillfully extracted. This reservoir contains everything from myths of origin to recent memories, from the separation of Earth and Heaven to the tracing of the group’s frontiers, from the divine to the human, the abstract to the concrete, and the universal to the particular. There are no breaks between these “stages” or “epochs,” and they all have the same degree of existence (they are all real life). The Maori can move between them all the more smoothly because they are structurally similar: each is basically an episode which, in its own way, tells the same story, and even if there are variations, the overall framework remains the same. As a result, cosmic myth ends up inhabiting “current events,” such that events really are myths.
But by the same token, the event is no event at all. It is not an event as modern European history construes it, that is, as so unique and novel that it can only be apprehended (and contained) by assigning it a teleological orientation by virtue of which “if it didn’t have a past, it would have a future,”31 courtesy of process and progress. Nor is it an event in the terms of what for a time was called “non-events-based” history, in which the event was essentially unimportant, barely the frothy mark left by the receding wave (and counting bubbles tells us nothing of the movement of the seas). For the Maori, events are immediately perceived “in the received order of structure, as identical with their original.”32 Events do not occur, they recur; they are not unique, they are repetitions.
In examining this more closely, we find two symmetrical and opposite strategies for accommodating the event. For how are we to understand that in this world which knows no future, where nothing “occurs,” the present reproduces the past? Through the mediation of descent, says Sahlins, since ancestors’ characteristics reappear in their descendants. “The whole universe is for the Maori a comprehensive kindred of common ancestry.”33 “It is a source of pure, unadulterated joy for the old Maori to be able to say to an enemy ‘I ate your father’ or ‘your ancestor,’ although the occurrence may have occurred ten generations before his time.”34 From this we can see how the heroic “I” functions: the past can only be experienced in the present, or rather, the divide between the two which inaugurates modern Western history does not exist.35 It would be better to say that past and present coexist, and that the “past” is “reabsorbed” into the “present.”36
Sahlins analyzes with brio the tragic interferences between two cultural orders and two regimes of historicity in his writings on the Hone Heke uprising of 1844–1846, which precisely brought Sir George Grey to New Zealand in the first place (and gave us his collection of Maori myths). In tracing the fate of the “working misunderstanding” (Sahlins), or parallel encoding, of what should have been an identical event for all the protagonists, he demonstrates that there are not only “other times, other customs,” but also other forms of history. Or, to use a different set of concepts, the protagonists experience the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous.37 The emblematic focus of the revolt was the flagpole on which, as one might expect, the British colors were flying. Four times it was chopped down by the Maori, and four times the British put it back up. For the rebel chief, the flagpole was, in his own words “the root cause of the war.”38 For the British, “flying the British colors” was an imperious (and imperial) necessity, on which any concession was unthinkable. So after each attack, the British sent for reinforcements and better security for their flag, eventually surrounding the pole with a stockade and blockhouse.
But there was a “misunderstanding.” The priority for the Maori was to hack down the pole on which the flag was flying, and the priority for the British was to protect the flag flying on the pole. Flagpole on the one hand, and Union Jack on the other; therein lay the discrepancy, even if what both sides basically wanted was territorial control. When the British finally put up fortifications to protect the flag, they confirmed the Maori’s initial hypothesis: the whole thing began to look more and more like a tuahu, a fortified altar—on which one or several poles were erected—and at the end it looked almost identical to the ones built by their ancestors when they first came to the island, to signify that the mana of the land was theirs. Boas’s words are borne out once again: the seeing eye is truly the organ of tradition. Moreover, building these sacred compounds mimetically re-enacted the originary separation of Earth and Heaven by Tane, and thus repeated the act through which human beings inherited the earth. And Tane was, of course, a tree. The link between the flagpole and possession of the land was thus more than simply symbolic: the flagpole was, literally, “the root” of war.
The misunderstanding also revealed other aspects of heroic history. Although Heke’s rebellion appeared to respond to a radically new situation, he explained one day to the governor that he was only an heir who had inherited rebellion and usurpation. His ancestral forbears forced him to wage war. The course of his life had been fixed long ago, with or without the Union Jack!
And to those trying to explain away the revolt by an economic crisis, Sahlins has no difficulty demonstrating that what this crisis, although real enough, represented for the Maori was the concrete consequence of a previous, unresolved episode. In 1840, the treaty “signed” by Maori chiefs confirmed their “ownership” of the land in return for acknowledging British “sovereignty.” However, as the Colonial Office well knew, these concepts did not exist in Maori. The meaning of the treaty remained open-ended. A first interpretation concluded, “The shadow of the land goes to Queen Victoria, but the substance remains to us,” but later the reverse seemed more accurate, “The substance of the land goes to the Europeans, the shadow only will be our portion.”39
It became clear, in any case, that the real issue was the mana. In toppling the flagpole, Hone Heke was being perfectly consistent with himself and the whole of his history. His “demystification” was absolutely correct, revealing as it did what the “Whites” “were prepared to conceal sometimes even from themselves.” He was re-enacting what the founding chiefs from distant Hawaiki did when they landed and took control of the country so many years previously. A myth was thus “decoded” by another myth, since the treaty was indeed a myth, even in the European sense of the term (something designed to deceive ignorant “savages”).
Sahlins applied similar frames of analysis to the sorry tale of Captain Cook. By dissecting the Hawaiian and the English parallel encoding of the same event (the sacrifice of Cook-Lono on 14 February 1779), he exposed how the “working misunderstanding” was active from the very beginning, starting before Cook’s death, culminating with it, and continuing afterward. Cook became a cult figure for both the British and the Hawaiians, and underwent a kind of double apotheosis. The British, for their part, generally “entered into the role the Hawaiians cast for them,” albeit “unwittingly,” not least Cook in his “passive acceptance of the dignities of his installation as Lono.”40 The outcome was that, “by virtue of Cook’s sacrifice, the mana of the Hawaiian kingship was itself British,” since any ruler now had to ensure Cook’s support. This did not escape Kamehameha, who, after killing the legitimate heir and seizing power, also seized Cook’s bones. Contrary to certain reductive explanations, Cook was considered to be a god not
because of empirical resemblances between the events of his voyage and the details of the Makahiki rites; rather, these rites were latterly elaborated, primarily by Kamehameha, as an iconic representation of Cook’s voyage. The Makahiki as we have come to know it is testimony to Cook’s sacrifice as a source of legitimacy of that chieftainship, and at the same time of the transformation of that chieftainship into statehood.41
That is how the tale of Cook came to underlie a powerful Hawaiian political myth. The Hawaiians’ decoding of Cook’s arrival as the return of Lono generated a whole series of exchanges between event and system, history and structure, and present and past, bringing countless misunderstandings in its wake.
As well as outlining his concept of heroic history, Sahlins suggested a particular approach: an anthropology of history. He did not simply want to do historical research in Fiji, but also to show how Fiji or Hawaii were themselves sources of history and in all senses Islands of History: islands in history, which have a history, but which are also productive of history, according to a specific, if by no means unique, order of time and regime of historicity. This specificity can best be grasped when interference between systems gives rise to discrepancies. A genuinely experimental situation is created, in which misunderstandings can bring into particularly sharp focus the different forms of temporality and the different regimes of historicity at work. A new perspective no longer centered on Western modes of historicity is introduced, and it provides, as Sahlins wished, “all kinds of new things to consider.”
To make Sahlins’s approach even clearer, we could compare his minutely detailed reconstructions of Hone Heke’s battles with medievalist Georges Duby’s analysis of the Battle of Bouvines. Both accounts were written around the same time, and both were concerned with rethinking the event. Duby set out “to look at this battle and the memory it has left us from the perspective of an anthropologist; in other words, to attempt to perceive both the battle and the memory as wrapped up in a cultural whole different from the one which at present molds our own relationship with the world.”42 He wanted his historical research to mirror the anthropologist’s attention to differences between cultural spheres. Mobilizing the whole range of his knowledge as a medievalist, he sought to produce an exhaustive interpretation of the traces left by the event, and managed to transform the few hours of the Battle of Bouvines into a way of shedding light on how a whole society acted and thought. As for the event itself, it “is nothing,” Duby maintained, outside of the traces it leaves. Once the cardinal transgression of engaging battle on a Sunday had been duly noted, Duby could explore the notion of “other times, other customs” to the full, but he never directly addressed the forms of temporal experience at stake, or their impact on the perception and construction of the event.43 Sahlins, by contrast, working as an anthropologist attentive to forms of history and the categories and conditions of production of history, added a third term: “other histories.” To which I, going one step further, have added: “other regimes of historicity.”
THIS FIRST EXERCISE IN “VIEWING FROM AFAR” CONNECTS WITH a particular debate, active from the 1950s to the 1980s, insofar as Sahlins’s work was also a kind of reply to Lefort’s question and enriched Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical reflections through concrete analyses (no, differences are not only on the side of the observer). By accompanying Sahlins across the Pacific, too rapidly no doubt, I have been able to extend my own field of inquiry or, more precisely, to delve into it more deeply. I have used Sahlins both as a reference point (on the question of forms of history) and as an interpreter (since I myself have no access to the Polynesian material). What emerges is that the notion of “regime of historicity” is relevant outside of European historiography (and is thus not simply a product of Europe’s self-contemplation); and, above all, that exploring the forms of history characterizing the societies of the Pacific Islands can actually help delineate the notion more closely. Heroic history, in Sahlins’s sense, is something of a touchstone.
A last word before moving on: a historian might regret that Sahlins compared the heroic regime of history not with the European form most closely resembling it, namely historia magistra vitae, but with the modern regime. His own reference to Vico might have inspired him to do otherwise. Was the Homeric epic already a form of heroic history? Europe’s great historiographic model, historia magistra, served for many centuries—until the end of the eighteenth century—to make the present intelligible through the past and the force of the exemplary. I shall come back to this in greater detail.44 But to what extent, precisely, were the Polynesian and European forms of history comparable? How were the categories of present, past, and future articulated in each case? What about Cook and his crew—how did they experience their order of time, and what regime of historicity organized their thinking? Sahlins counterpoints heroic history only with modern historiography, which he treats at times with a certain irony, whereas this historiography has precisely abandoned the exemplary for the unique—as though he had forgotten that this history also has a history, which itself presupposes another order of time. Two requirements had to be met for the (modern) event to appear: the future had to be “in front” (whereas in Fiji it was “behind,” and people had their backs to it); and the separation between past and present had to be in place.
Since the publication of Islands of History, anthropologists have continued discussing both the history of anthropology and the history of the societies anthropologists study. Johannes Fabian has argued that “anthropology emerged and established itself as an allochronic discourse; it is a science of other men in another Time,” or even outside of time.45 Anthropology’s object was constructed by situating it in another time. Since evolutionism, functionalism, and structuralism simply incorporated this premise uncritically, each in its own way, time never had the place it should have had in anthropology. Anthropology must henceforth be set upon firmer foundations, Fabian declared, by positing “coevalness” from the start: we and the other are “of the same age.” Although this radical critique of the discipline’s presuppositions seeks to introduce or reintroduce time, it has very little to say on the question of history: on the links between relations to time and forms of history (before, during, and after colonial imperialism, from the perspective of both the colonized and the colonizer). Recognition of the coevalness of the interlocutors is not the answer to everything and throws hardly any light on the temporality of this co-presence.46 Might, then, the notion of the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, as Koselleck used it, be a satisfactory tool, or should it be rejected as setting too European a standard?
A collective volume, entitled Time, likewise focused on time, and usefully brought together anthropologists and historians writing about different places and periods. The book addressed the experience of time in different geographical, cultural, and historical contexts, from clocks in the European Renaissance to the pasts of an Indian village.47 From the outset it rejected any sort of “great divide,” and instead sought to address different temporalities and highlight the complexity of each. In viewing these societies not as outside time but, on the contrary, as participating in the same “turbulent stream of time,” the book could present different but comparable historicities. Yet however valuable the research areas opened up by pooling and diversifying histories, anthropological data, and temporalities, the issue of the types of history involved and their articulation with forms of temporality was not broached directly. It lay beyond the volume’s scope.
Nicholas Thomas, whose concerns were with “the incorporation of…temporal processes in general in anthropological thought,” took up Fabian’s argument that history had been excluded from anthropology, because the latter’s object “was and is essentially a social or cultural system or structure out of time.”48 Time can be integrated into anthropology, he argued, only if the object of study changed from “the system” to “the systemic process.” Failing this, any attempt to integrate time into anthropology, as Sahlins does, would inevitably miss the mark. When we read Sahlins, we have no idea how “change” was conceived in Hawaii before the arrival of the Europeans: “The analysis of history developed by Sahlins and some of his associates is thus a very limited theory, which says nothing about the historical processes which actually make the conditions of life and culture variable across time and space.”49
Although Sahlins’s theory is undoubtedly limited—but also, I tend to think, deliberately so—it throws into sharp relief a particular moment, the liminal moment of the encounter. Sahlins analyzes how the interpretative logics of the two protagonists differ, and the interferences, misunderstandings, and discrepancies arising. In short, he shows how the parties construe events in terms of their own experience and expectations. Through such events, understood as “interpreted instances,” a crisis of time becomes visible. On both sides, an order of time is at least momentarily revealed and disturbed. Sahlins’s contribution to our inquiry is therefore doubly precious. Was the heroic regime the “historical principle,” in Lefort’s sense, of these societies? And was it the only one, and at what point in time? All these questions are open to further debate. Our detour via the Pacific has in any case enabled us to confirm the purchase of the notion of regime of historicity beyond the frontiers of Europe, and also to define more closely Sahlins’s and, before him, Lévi-Strauss’s conception of history. Moreover, Sahlins’s notion of “structure of the conjuncture” is itself a way of describing how past, present, and future may be articulated. If in turn we historicized this structure, might we not discover that each great regime of historicity has a “structure of the conjuncture” proper to it?50