ABSTRACT
The contributors to this volume take their inspiration from Marshall Sahlins’ article ‘The economics of develop-man in the Pacific’ (1992). At issue is Sahlins’ assertion, toward the end, that ‘a necessary stage in the process of modernization’ is an ‘experience of humiliation’ though which people must ‘learn to hate what they already have’ and ‘despise what they are’ (1992, pp.23, 24). These comments come after an extended discussion outlining the ways colonized societies in various places appropriated features of the colonizers’ world – commodities, mostly – for enhanced performance of their own cultural practices, in Sahlins’ words for the promotion of ‘their own culture on a bigger and better scale’ (1992, p.12). This process he calls ‘develop-man,’ as a play on the Tok Pisin term for development. Even when I heard Sahlins’ paper for the first time, at a public lecture at the University of Hawaii in 1991, I was struck by his characteristic skill at articulating a model of cultural difference within a frame of general social and historical processes. Less characteristic was his evocation of a general psychological experience, felt ‘humiliation’ leading to the generation of a ‘global inferiority complex’ as an explanatory variable. Sahlins writes, ‘[N]o matter how fashionable it is these days … to reduce history to a cult of “power” … coercion in itself does not seem a sufficient explanation’ for different peoples’ decisions to want to ‘be like us’ (1992, p.24). He argues that an appeal to people’s actual experience, in this case humiliation in the face of colonial rule, is also required. Abandoning traditional forms comes at a certain point in the colonial enterprise, when the colonized come to experience the encounter as something fundamentally humiliating. For someone like me, interested in including general psychological processes in an empathic view of others, this assertion was something I could easily applaud.
