Chiefs Today: Traditional Pacific Leadership and the Postcolonial State (Contemporary Issues in Asia and the Pacific) - Softcover

White, Geoffrey M.; Lindstrom, Lamont

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804728518 ISBN 13: 9780804728515

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Thirty-five years after the first new Pacific states gained their independence, traditional leaders remain important political actors throughout the region. The political environs of the South Pacific, freshly populated with presidents, prime ministers, members of parliament, and local judiciary officers, are also increasingly crowded with newly visible chiefs. Far from being premodern relics, the chiefs who operate within modern Pacific states today figure significantly in attempts to fashion national identities and manage the direction of political and economic development. This volume presents detailed analyses of the accommodations between chiefs and states in thirteen Pacific societies. In some states, traditional perquisites and political authority have overlapped so that the state is a contemporary form of chiefdom. Elsewhere, chiefs operate as a mechanism of local accommodation to centralized state authority, facilitating state operations in the local community. In still other states, local chiefs have risen up against central authority, leading their communities in opposition to the state and its deprecations. In each case, the chief is a focus for cultural struggle in the border zones of local, national, and transnational politics.

About this edition

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0804728518
• ISBN 13: 9780804728515
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: White Geoffrey M., Lindstrom Lamont