DAVID PICARD ‘Being a model for the world’: performing Creoleness in La R ´ eunion In this article, I shall argue that concepts of Creoleness are used both to formulate an ethics of modern time and mobility, and to form social realities whose experience, among others through tourism, brings this very ethics alive. Creoleness presents itself here as a powerful allegory to think about time in terms of a linear process, as ‘history’ emanating in an imaginary point of purity and origin, and leading towards a state of increasing melange and ‘creolisation’. Through a historical and ethnographic study of landscape poetic, spatial planning and museum initiatives in the Indian Ocean island of La R´ eunion, I will show how the island and islanders were made to inhabit and ultimately to perform this allegory as a means to participate in a global modernity. Through the particular focus on a recent museum project, the article will point to the ambivalences underlying this new sign-economy within which facets of the islanders’ everyday life are elevated as to be or become a ‘model for the world’. Key words Creoleness, modernity, cultural economy, world society, modern mythology Introduction In this text, I will explore how concepts of Creoleness have become a shared symbolic ground enabling a variety of social actors to think about their being in the world and to connect to each other. On the one hand, I am interested in Creoleness as an ethics of modernity adding sense to modernist notions of time, progress, history and future. On the other hand, I am interested in the formation of social realities based upon the mobilisation of concepts of Creoleness and the modes of participation of ‘Creole societies’ within world society. My exploration focuses on the Indian Ocean island of La R´ eunion. Concepts of Creoleness (also of cr´ eolit´ e and creolisation) have been claimed here in various historical contexts and have consequently been formative for the shape and the self-understanding of the island’s society. Most recently, during the last quarter of the 20th century, the colonial cash-crop economy in this island was superseded by an emerging tourism and heritage industry. In this context, the projection of concepts of Creoleness transformed much of the island’s nature, landscapes and populations into tourist attractions. This initiated a new form of transnational sign- economy within which the performance of Creoleness became a new means of social participation. At the same time, in a postcolonial context marked by struggles for political emancipation among the social elites within the island, concepts of Creoleness were also mobilised in attempts to emancipate an autonomous island identity. Through 302 Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2010) 18, 3 302–315. C  2010 European Association of Social Anthropologists. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2010.00113.x