Logiques locales, logiques nationales : mutations politiques dans trois pays dits mélanésiens – LocNatPol

Pacific societies are engaged in processes of intense social change that afforded novel theoretical approaches. One theme became central: the politics of identity and tradition within the context of nation building. This type of complex situation is not limited to the Pacific, but research has often been inspired by the practices and cultural structures of this region, and in particular by the Melanesian situation, in order to rethink the relationship between 'traditional' societies and globalisation. Research on 'Kastom' and 'Neo-ritualizations' has been particularly interesting in this respect. Many reformulations of the interaction between local and national identities attempting to concord with the imposed construction of the democratic nation have been analyzed. Often, these reformulations take the form of actualizations, reinterpretations or inventions of ritualized practices. -- However, these studies have not allowed to fully understand the difficulties Pacific countries encounter in their processes of nation building. They remain inefficient in front of structures that are disintegrated as quickly as they appeared. We propose to reopen this theme of research - which is central for the social sciences as well as for the Pacific countries themselves - but we are proposing a new hypothesis. The mechanisms of nation building under the pressure of western nations cannot be fully understood if research is not oriented towards the dialectic at work between local power structures and the fabrication of their national representation. -- A version of this project was submitted during the last call for proposals ANR 'Blancs'. Despite the numerous positive points underlined in the reports, our project has not been selected because of the following main reasons: the problematic and the comparative methodology were not sufficiently explained. The project is now explicit with respect to the context and our hypotheses, as well as with what concerns the necessary comparative methodology embraced in our project. The study we are going to undertake is concerned with the local (and not the national) strategies that express themselves within local (and not national) power structures in order to study particular cases in which we analyze the 'nationalization' of elements of local (and not national) identities. We are approaching this question from three angles: the local political hierarchies and strategies that frame local expressions; the local processes of attempts to nationalize these expressions; and the exogenous constraints limiting these expressions. Henceforth, the nation is included in our project only as the ultimate ambition of these local strategies. It is the means through which these ambitions are expressed and constructed locally that will retain our attention. Our project has thus to be considered complementary to research undertaken in the domain of nation building itself, decolonization or migration within the Pacific. --We will concentrate on particular cases within three pacific states or territories (Vanuatu, Fiji and New Caledonia). Despite de distinctiveness of their historical contexts and the distant geographical situations, we advance the hypothesis that the strategies that work towards the crystallization of local particularities and that have the ambition to be 'nationalized' are in these three countries or territories comparable. It may even be possible to speak of a 'Melanesian way' of national integration of local particularities. Far from attempting to establish a compromise between various forms of cultural expressions, or from inventing a common theme in which each particular expression would be able to find its identity, this 'Melanesian way' rather attempts to superimpose, similar to a patchwork, particular local expressions which remain intact but de-contextualized within the national level. If this hypothesis is verified, nation building cannot proceed through the outgrowth from local conditions, but has to be conceived as an agglomerate of local reductions in which the sentiment of national belonging must be expressed though the sentiment of a local belonging. The nation cannot be 'One' for and through itself, it is not a hybrid construction as well, but it would arrange for distinguishable anchor points of recognizable local identities. -- The call for project 'ANR Blanc' has the aim to 'provide a significant impulse to ambitious scientific projects which position themselves favorably within the international competition'. The international positioning of our project is undeniable. It integrates researchers and exchanges that strongly trespass the French national limits. It also provides for a federation of researchers exceeding even the partners of this project. Our project is also ambitious and 'risky' in a positive sense, as it engages in situational comparative studies guided by a shared and strong hypothesis and a complex but clear problematic.