The Politics of Discursive Authority in Research on the “Invention of Tradition”

Abstract

Jean Jackson (1989) asks, in the title of an essay, "Is There a Way to Talk about Making Culture without Making Enemies?" I think that it would be fair to respond that, generally speaking, the answer is no, and this article explores a number of reasons as to why this is so. My concern here is with scholarly analyses of the "invention of tradition," and my point of departure is provided by responses to such work by people who see the traditions that are being discussed as their own. It is no secret that these responses have often been critical and at times quite angry. I want to present some ideas as to why anthropologists who lodge critiques that they see as progressive and anticolonialist have been accused of extending legitimations of white, postcolonial forms of discursive domination. These "native" critiques seem to have been largely marginalized or dismissed, and I think wrongly so, because they raise general questions about the politics of representation in scholarship, particularly anthropology. Constructivist studies of the invention of tradition and its relationship to nationalism and ethnicity were catalyzed by the publication of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's The Invention of Tradition (1983) and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1991[1983]). These works have received so much critical attention that it hardly seems necessary to introduce readers to the notion that cultural forms that derive their authority from a perceived connection with the past are "invented," "imagined," "constructed," or "made." Anthropologists and folklorists such as John Dorst (1989), David Guss (1993, 1994b), Richard Handler (1984, 1985b, 1988; Handler and Linnekin 1984), Alan Hanson (1989), Michael Herzfeld (1982), Jean Jackson (1995a), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (in press), Roger Keesing (1989), and Jocelyn Linnekin (1983, 1991b) argue that traditions are created in the present, thus reflecting contestations of interest more than the cultural essence of a purportedly homogeneous and bounded "traditional" group. Affirming the authenticity of tradi-