Abstract:
This article proposes that contemporary ethnic subjectivities are shaped
by modernist discourses. Ethnographic material about a group of Okinawan fishermen
who worked with Solomon Islanders from 1971 to 2000 is used to explore the effect on
national identities of being: perceived as modern, or primitive. Okinawa is an island
group to the south of Japan that became part of the Japanese Empire in the I970s.
Since then Okinawa has been defined as primitive against modern Japan. Modernist
discourse was one of the range of influences on relations between Okinawan fishermen
and Solomon islanders. Symbolically violent identifications of Okinawans as more
modern than Solomon Islanders stymied efforts at grassroots cosmopolitanism.
Insofar as perceptions of relative levels of modernness of ethnic groups act to rank
them, modernism is therefore one of the factors at stake in competition between
nationalisms and friction between ethnic groups.
