Transcultural adoption in Samoa (and in sport)

Sacks, Benjamin

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-27268-5_2

Benjamin Sacks⁹

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Sport and Politics ((PASSP))

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Abstract

This chapter seeks a general explanation of cultural transfer and change that can account for how Samoans altered cricket’s method and meaning. Historians of sport have for several decades relied on the idea of transcultural diffusion to explain these processes. This notion fails to capture the complexity inherent in sporting encounters, however, such that we need to move beyond diffusion. The chapter hence turns to notions of ‘mixing’, notably transculturation. Such ‘mixing’ was not limited to cricket, of course; as with other colonised peoples, Samoans frequently adapted introduced ideas and practices. Far from representing an isolated example, therefore, cricket’s fate is instead indicative of a more general Samoan capacity for transculturation—as well as a product of distinctive historical circumstances.

The Samoans are in truth a peculiar people. They never do anything like anybody else, and although they have adopted many things from the civilised world, from Christianity to cricket, everything has been altered by their racial eccentricities.

‘A.W.T.’, ‘A Samoan Cricket Match’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 November 1901, p. 7

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Notes

1.
Ibid.
2.
David Strang and John W. Meyer, ‘Institutional Conditions for Diffusion’, Theory and Society 22:4 (1993), p. 487.
3.
Jason Kaufman and Orlando Patterson, ‘Cross-National Cultural Diffusion: The Global Spread of Cricket’, American Sociological Review 70:1 (2005), p. 82.
4.
David Strang and Sarah Soule, ‘Diffusion in Organisations and Social Movements: From Hybrid Corn to Poison Pills’, Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998), p. 276, cited in Kaufman and Patterson, ‘Cross-National Cultural Diffusion’, p. 82.
5.
Maarten van Bottenburg, ‘Beyond Diffusion: Sport and Its Remaking in Cross-Cultural Contexts’, Journal of Sport History 37:1 (2010), p. 45.
6.
Allen Guttmann, ‘Sports Diffusion: A Response to Maguire and the Americanization Commentaries’, Sociology of Sport Journal 8:2 (1991), pp. 185–190.
7.
S.W. Pope, ‘Imperialism’, in S.W. Pope and John Nauright (eds.), Routledge Companion to Sports History (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 229–232; see also Allen Guttmann, Games and Empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
8.
J.A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: Aspects of the Diffusion of an Ideal (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1985), p. 17.
9.
John G. Reid and Robert Reid, ‘Diffusion and Discursive Stabilisation: Sports Historiography and the Contrasting Fortunes of Cricket and Ice Hockey in Canada’s Maritime Provinces, 1869–1914’, Journal of Sport History 42:1 (2015), p. 90.
10.
Richard Cashman, Patrons, Players and the Crowd: The Phenomenon of Indian Cricket (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1980); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 89–113.
11.
Kaufman and Patterson, ‘Cross-National Cultural Diffusion’, pp. 82–110.
12.
Ibid., p. 84.
13.
Ibid., p. 84.
14.
Ibid., p. 99.
15.
Tom Melville, The Tented Field: A History of Cricket in America (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1998).
16.
Kaufman and Patterson, ‘Cross-National Cultural Diffusion’, 2005, p. 106.
17.
Narelle McGlusky, ‘The Willow and the Palm: an exploration of the role of cricket in Fiji’ (PhD diss., James Cook University, 2005).
18.
Ibid., pp. 215–216.
19.
Strang and Meyer, ‘Institutional Conditions for Diffusion’, p. 503.
20.
Shohei Sato, ‘The sportification of judo: global convergence and evolution’, Journal of Global History 8:2 (2013), p. 316.
21.
Richard Cashman, ‘Cricket and Colonialism: Colonial Hegemony and Indigenous Subversion?’, in J.A. Mangan (ed.), Pleasure, Profit, Proselytism: British culture and sport at home and abroad, 1700–1914 (London: Frank Cass, 1988), p. 261.
22.
Reid and Reid, ‘Diffusion and Discursive Stabilisation’, p. 107.
23.
van Bottenburg, ‘Beyond Diffusion’, p. 41.
24.
Ibid., p. 42.
25.
Ibid., p. 47.
26.
Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1999).
27.
Ibid., p. 39.
28.
Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p. 90.
29.
Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 163.
30.
‘Cricket’, Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette, 30 August 1879, p. 2.
31.
Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette, 4 June 1881, p. 2; Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette, 11 June 1881, p. 2.
32.
William B. Churchward, My Consulate in Samoa: A Record of Four Years’ Sojourn in the Navigators Islands, with Personal Experiences of King Malietoa Laupepa, his Country, and his Men (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1887), pp. 142–143.
33.
Ibid., pp. 143–144.
34.
Ibid., p. 143.
35.
‘Cricket’, Samoa Times and South Sea Gazette, 6 September 1879, p. 2.
36.
‘Sport in Apia’, Samoa Times and South Sea Advertiser, 14 June 1890, p. 2.
37.
For surveys of these terms, see Charles Stewart, ‘Syncretism and Its Synonyms: Reflections on Cultural Mixture’, Diacritics 29:3 (1999), pp. 40–62; Charles Stewart, ‘Creolization, Hybridity, Syncretism, Mixture’, Portuguese Studies, 27:1 (2011), pp. 48–55; Julie F. Cadell, ‘The Art of Transculturation’, in Julie F. Cadell (ed.), Transculturation in British Art, 1770–1930 (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), pp. 1–17.
38.
David Armitage and Alison Bashford, ‘Introduction: The Pacific and its Histories’ in David Armitage and Alison Bashford (eds.), Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 15. See also Greg Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas, 1774–1880 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1980).
39.
See Paul Readman, Cynthia Radding and Chad Bryant, ‘Introduction: Borderlands in a Global Perspective’ in Paul Readman, Cynthia Radding and Chad Bryant (eds.), Borderlands in World History, 1700–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 5–13.
40.
Lamont Lindstrom, ‘Syncretism’, in Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer (eds.), Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology, 3rd edition (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 812.
41.
In the hands of cultural theorists, ‘hybridity’ is seen as an inherently subversive, anti-colonial process. See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
42.
Emma Kruse Va’ai’s uses hybridity to describe the ongoing process of mutual borrowing and interweaving that characterises language in Samoa. Since the release of Jerry W. Leach and Gary Kildea’s documentary in 1976, moreover, anthropologists have used ‘indigenised’ cricket in the Trobriand Islands to illustrate the concept of syncretism. Emma Kruse Va’ai, Producing the Text of Culture: The Appropriation of English in Contemporary Samoa (Lepapaigalagala: National University of Samoa, 2011); Jerry W. Leach & Gary Kildea, Trobriand cricket: An Ingenious Response to Colonialism [video recording] (Canberra: Ronin Films, 1976).
43.
Albert Wendt, ‘Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body’, Span 42–43 (1996), p. 26.
44.
Stewart, ‘Syncretism and Its Synonyms’, pp. 55–58.
45.
Stewart, ‘Syncretism and Its Synonyms’, p. 48.
46.
Fernando Ortiz, Estudios etnosociológicos (La Habana: Editorial Ciencias Sociales, 1991), p. 16, cited in Stephan Palmié, The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 98.
47.
Cadell, ‘The Art of Transculturation’, especially pp. 1–6.
48.
Ibid., p. 7.
49.
In this sense, my use of ‘contested space’ is analogous to what David Tomas calls “transcultural spaces”, where “natives” and “newcomers” adapt to and adopt one others’ behaviours and practices in a shared social, cultural, and physical space. This space is neither wholly native nor wholly newcomer; in meeting one another, the parties also change each other. See David Tomas, Transcultural Spaces and Transcultural Beings (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).
50.
The notion of social space, especially as it applies to Samoan relationships, is explored further in Chap. 3. I employ both ‘shared space’ and ‘social space’ liberally in Chaps. 7 and 8 in the context of Samoans using sport to navigate papalagi colonialisms.
51.
Elfriede Hermann, ‘Mimesis, Ethnopsychology, and Transculturation: Identifications in Birthday Celebrations among Banabans in Fiji’ in Janneatte Mageo and Elfriede Hermann (eds.), Mimesis and Pacific Transcultural Encounters: Making Likenesses in Time, Trade, and Ritual Reconfigurations (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), pp. 189–208; Geoffrey Colson, ‘A Fresh Approach to Transculturation in Contemporary Music in Tahiti’, Eras, 16:1 (2014), pp. 1–22.
52.
Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). By Pratt’s definition, a contact zone is a social space “where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination”. Ibid., p. 4.
53.
Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Arts of the Contact Zone’, Profession, 1991, p. 36.
54.
F.J.H. Grattan, An Introduction to Samoan Custom (Apia: Samoa Printing and Publishing, 1948), p. 115.
55.
Augustin Krämer, The Samoa Islands: Material Culture, vol. 2, trans. Theodore Verhaaren (Auckland: Polynesian Press, 1995), p. 424.
56.
Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 6.
57.
Kiristina Sailiata, ‘The Samoan Cause: Colonialism, Culture, and the Rule of Law’ (PhD diss., University of Michigan: Ann Arbor, 2014), pp. 92–93.
58.
Va’ai, Producing the Text of Culture, pp. 51–55.
59.
Ibid., p. 53.
60.
Wendt, ‘Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body’, pp. 15–29, cited in Heather E. Young Leslie and Ping-Ann Addo, ‘Pacific Textiles, Pacific Cultures: Hybridity and Pragmatic Creativity’, Pacific Arts Journal 3–5 (2007), p. 13.
61.
See, for example, Young Leslie and Addo, ‘Pacific Textiles’.
62.
Richard Gilson, Samoa 1830 to 1900: the politics of a multi-cultural community (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1970), especially pp. 115–137.
63.
John Garrett, To Live Among the Stars: Christian Origins in Oceania (Suva: World Council of Churches/Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 1982), pp. 121–122.
64.
Ibid., p. 278.
65.
Malama Meleisea, The Making of Modern Samoa: Traditional Authority and Colonial Administration in the History of Western Samoa (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 1987), p. 13.
66.
Va’ai, Producing the Text of Culture, p. 39.
67.
Hugh M. Polworth, ‘Church Life in the South Seas’, Mid-Pacific Magazine 3:4 (April 1912), p. 365.
68.
Garrett, To Live Among the Stars, p. 278.
69.
Va’ai, Producing the Text of Culture, especially pp. x–xiii, 22–41.
70.
Margaret Mead, ‘The Role of the Individual in Samoan Culture’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 58 (1928), p. 495.
71.
Felix M. Keesing, Modern Samoa: its government and changing life (London: Allen & Unwin, 1934), p. 477.
72.
Greg Ryan, ‘Few and Far Between: Māori and Pacific Contributions to New Zealand Cricket’, Sport in Society 10:1 (2007), pp. 82–83.
73.
Basil Thompson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1894), pp. 150–151.
74.
Basil Thompson, ‘The Great International Cricket Match’, in Martin Polley (ed.), The History of Sport in Britain, 1880–1914, vol. 5 (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 79.
75.
Tongan Premier’s Office, Tonga Government Blue Book (Tonga: Tongan Government, 1883), p. 1.
76.
Thompson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister, p. 151.
77.
See, for example, ‘Cricket Notes’, Referee, 9 February 1888, p. 6; ‘Our Tongan letter’, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 August 1892, p. 5.
78.
Lia Maka, ‘Ta Fihi—From Tangled Web We Weave Anew’, in Arlene Griffen (ed.), Lalanga Pasifika: Weaving the Pacific (Suva: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of the South Pacific, 2006), p. 23.
79.
Elinor Mordaunt, ‘Playboys of the Pacific’, The Dundee Courier, July 7, 1924, p. 4.
80.
‘King George of Tonga’, Leader, 3 August 1918, p. 52.
81.
‘Tonga News’, Australian Town and Country Journal, 2 July 1898, p. 28.
82.
See Elizabeth Wood-Ellem, Queen Salote of Tonga: The Story of an Era, 1900–1965 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001), especially pp. 70–83.
83.
‘Civilised Tonga’, The Age, 28 January 1933, p. 14.
84.
‘Tonga up-to-date’, Daily Mercury, 6 February 1933, p. 11. See also Ben Sacks, ‘“Who’s for Tonga?” Tongan Visitors and Australian Escapism in the Summer of 1932–3’, Journal of Pacific History, 2019 (published online 24 April 2019).
85.
Fiji Times, 10 January 1874, cited in McGlusky, ‘The Willow and the Palm’, p. 176.
86.
McGlusky, ‘The Willow and the Palm’, p. 91.
87.
Philip Snow, Cricket in the Fiji Islands (Dunedin: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1949), pp. 16–18, cited in Ryan, ‘Few and Far Between’, p. 82.
88.
O’Brien to Colonial Office Despatch 137, 31 Dec. 1897, cited in Brij Lal, Broken Waves: A History of the Fiji Islands in the Twentieth Century (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), p. 19.
89.
Lal, Broken Waves, pp. 19–21.
90.
McGlusky, ‘The Willow and the Palm’, p. 93.
91.
Snow, Cricket in the Fiji Islands, p. 87, cited in McGlusky, ‘The Willow and the Palm’, p. 179.
92.
McGlusky, ‘The Willow and the Palm’, p. 199.
93.
For accounts of customary recreational and athletic activities in Fiji and Tonga, see, for instance, Sione Lātūkefu, ‘The opposition to the influence of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionaries in Tonga’, Historical Studies 12:46 (1966), pp. 248–264; McGlusky, ‘The Willow and the Palm’, especially pp. 133–155.
94.
Adolph Brewster Brewster, The Hill Tribes of Fiji (London: Seeley, 1922), pp. 231–235; Reginald St-Johnson, South Sea Reminiscences (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1922), pp. 87–88.
95.
See Judith W. Huntsman, ‘Concepts of Kinship and Categories of Kinsmen in the Tokelau Islands’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 80:3 (1971), pp. 322–325; David Wetherall, ‘Christian Missionaries in Eastern New Guinea: A Study of European, South Sea Island and Papuan Influences, 1877–1942’ (PhD diss., Australian National University, 1974), pp. 259–260.
96.
See, for example, Sharon W. Tiffany, ‘Port town village organisation in Western Samoa’, Journal of the Polynesian Society 88:2 (1979), pp. 127–175; Julien Clément, ‘Les Manu Samoa: Anthropologie d’une équipe nationale de rugby dans la globalisation du sport’, L’Homme 1:205 (2013), pp. 79–97.
97.
Julien Clément, ‘Participating in the Global Competition: Denaturalizing “Flair” in Samoan Rugby’, The Contemporary Pacific, 26:2 (2014), p. 382.
98.
Athletic Officer [Chief Pay Clerk F.P. Brown], Memorandum for the Captain of the Yard: ‘Football Game between Naval Station and Fagatoga—at 3:30pm 27 November 1930’, 24 November 1930; P10 Amusement and Recreation [#14]; General Correspondence, 1921–1949, Box 28 (NN-373-91); RG 313: Records of Naval Operating Forces, 1849–1997, National Archives and Records Administration–Pacific Region (NARA), San Bruno.
99.
Fa’anofo Lisaclaire Uperesa, ‘Fabled Futures: Development, Gridiron Football, and Transnational Movements in American Samoa’ (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2010), pp. 97–99. See also Rob Ruck, Tropic of Football: The Long and Perilous Journey of Samoans to the NFL (New York: New Press, 2018), pp. 103–105.
100.
Uperesa, ‘Fabled Futures’, p. 99.
101.
Ruck, Tropic of Football, p. 10.
102.
Uperesa, ‘Fabled Futures’, pp. 97–98.
103.
‘Rugby in Apia’, Auckland Star, Tuesday, March 20, 1928, p. 15; John Hazelman, ‘Brief History of Marist Brothers Primary School Mulivai’, Marist Brothers Old Pupils Association, http://www.maristoldpupils.ws/brief-history-of-marist-brothers-primary-school-mulivai.html (accessed 7 March 2019); Uperesa, ‘Fabled Futures’, pp. 97–103.

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Benjamin Sacks

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Sacks, B. (2019). Transcultural adoption in Samoa (and in sport). In: Cricket, Kirikiti and Imperialism in Samoa, 1879–1939. Palgrave Studies in Sport and Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27268-5_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27268-5_2
Published: 11 October 2019
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