The separate paths often taken by cultural histories and ethnographies of the self tend to produce either semiotic interpretations devoid of experience or psychological accounts removed from social and political process. This book has suggested avenues of rapprochement. The approach taken here to the Santa Isabel paramount chief ceremony, as well as to quieter forms of historical discourse, suggests that narratives of the past do pragmatic work as cultural tools building both self-understanding and sociopolitical realities.

A common criticism of structuralist analyses is that the search for coherence and pattern in cultural forms leaves them ungrounded in the varied particulars of either individual cognition or social practice. The tenuous connection between structural model and social or psychological reality has on occasion evoked skeptical criticism from the uninitiated. For example, a recent book dealer's catalogue commented that a new volume of Polynesian studies “in the structuralist mode” has “much to ponder, little to accept as not a reflection of each author's mind rather than of Polynesian social ways present or past” (Cellar Book Shop 422: 8, cited in Marcus 1988: 111). Whereas the poststructuralist response to this and other critiques is to subsume problems of mind or subjectivity within broader historically based discourses of power, the tack taken in this book has been to locate subjectivity in discourse by examining directly the practices that produce collective self-understanding.