ABSTRACT
Contemporary identity politics in Asia and the Pacific has been very much concerned with the rediscovery and reinvigoration of what are assumed to be autochthonous traditions. Movements promoting such traditions are often part of a broader project aiming to build renewed pride in a cultural heritage that may have been suppressed or largely destroyed under colonization. Projects like this are hardly unique to Asia and the Pacific – they have been just as evident in Africa and the Middle East as well as among indigenous people who live as minority groups in places like Australasia and North America. Nor are they confined strictly to postcolonial situations – as the politics of identity in contemporary Tonga demonstrates. 1 Similar phenomena are recognizable also in the heartlands of some former colonial powers where the resuscitation and politicization of cultural identities have been taking place at a sub-state level in explicit political forms from Scotland to Catalonia, or at a supra-state level across northern Scandinavia by the Sami people, or at the level of the state itself in the case of Germany where the collapse of the Cold War and the Berlin Wall immediately raised issues concerning a coherent national identity for the new Germany. And it is certainly recognizable in the nation-building projects of many newly independent countries following the breakdown of the Soviet Empire as well as for Russia itself.
