ABSTRACT
Brought into the orbit of the capitalist World System … they have proven themselves quick studies in commercial cunning – which they use to stage the most extravagant traditional ceremonies anyone could ever remember. More pigs have been eaten and more pearl shells exchanged in these recent shindigs than was ever done in the good old days … (Ibid.) Sahlins’ target here is world system theory, which narrativizes history in ‘tristes
tropes’ (Sahlins, 1994) of Eurocentric domination and indigenous victimization (ibid., p.381; see also 1992a, p.23). Sahlins’ view is the obverse: indigenous agents achieve cultural efflorescence by indigenizing Western objects (1992a, p.16), thus encompassing ‘the capitalist world system in an order that is logically more inclusive: their own system of the world’ (ibid., p.14). It is this efflorescence and encompassment that Sahlins’ neologism developman signifies. Ultimately, however, there is a ‘passage from developman to development, marked from a selective to an eclectic relation to Western commodities’ (ibid., p.23). This passage bespeaks an experience of humiliation, in which indigenous peoples ‘learn to hate what they already have, what they have always considered their well-being. Beyond that, they have to despise what they are, to hold their own existence in contempt – and want, then, to be someone else’ (ibid., p.24). It bears remarking that, to the extent that humiliation is inevitable, Sahlins’ reading of colonial and postcolonial histories is as teleological as the world system theory it purports to criticize.
