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Anthropologists and world historians make strange bedfellows. Although the latter frequently employ anthropological methods in their descriptions of cross-cultural exchanges, the former have raised substantial reservations about global approaches to history. Fearing loss of specificity, anthropologists object to the effacing qualities of techniques employed by world historians—this despite the fact that anthropology itself was a global, comparative enterprise in the nineteenth century. This book seeks to recover some of anthropology's global flavor by viewing its history in Oceania through the notion of the ethnographic frontier—the furthermost limits of the anthropologically known regions of the Pacific. The colony of German New Guinea (1884–1914) presents an ideal example of just such a contact zone. Colonial administrators there were drawn to approaches partially inspired by anthropology. Anthropologists and museum officials exploited this interest by preparing large-scale expeditions to German New Guinea. The book explores the interactions between German colonial officials, resident ethnographic collectors, and indigenous peoples, arguing that all were instrumental in the formation of anthropological theory. It shows how changes in collecting aims and methods helped shift ethnographic study away from its focus on material artifacts to a broader consideration of indigenous culture. It also shows how ethnological collecting could become politicized and connect to national concerns.

This ethnography examines the colonization of the Pacific island of Rapa Nui/Easter Island by the Latin American country of Chile. It also discusses the Rapanui people’s growing emphasis on cultural difference. The first part, entitled “Challenging the nation-state”, gives an historical account of Chile’s political relationship with the island, from the moment of annexation in 1888 up to the present day. In the second part, “Polynesian cultural politics and global imaginaries”, I describe various contemporary forms of cultural politics. To express their difference, the Rapanui are increasingly engaging in cultural performances such as sculpting, dancing, body painting and other cultural expressions, as well as a yearly festival. They are also revitalizing their Polynesian language and traditional concepts of land and territory, and strengthening contacts with other Polynesians and the international community. This emphasis on cultural politics creates tensions between the Rapanui--who increasingly claim their right to self-determination as a people--and the Chilean nation-state, which insists on its supposed rights to sovereignty over the island. Moreover, I discuss how the global fascination with Rapa Nui has resulted in a blooming tourist industry, which commodifies Rapanui difference and creates a possibility to loosen economic and, potentially, political ties with Chile. The realms of the cultural and the political have thus become entangled in subtle but important ways.

Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book is an anthology of twenty-first century ethnographic research and writing about the global worlds of home and disjuncture in Asia and the Pacific Islands. The stories reveal novel insights into the serendipitous nature of fieldwork. Unique in its inclusion of “homework”—ethnography that directly engages with issues and identities in which the ethnographer finds political solidarity and belonging in fields at home—the book contributes to growing trends that complicate the distinction between “insiders” and “outsiders.” The obligations that fieldwork engenders among researchers and local communities are exemplified by contributors who are often socially engaged with the peoples and places they work. In its focus on Asia and the Pacific Islands, the book offers ethnographic updates on topics that range from ritual money burning in China to the militarization of Hawai‘i to the social role of text messages in identifying marriage partners in Vanuatu to the cultural power of robots in Japan. These cultural encounters will resonate with readers and provide valuable talking points for exploring the human diversity that makes the study of ourselves and each other simultaneously rewarding and challenging.

Becoming Landowners: Entanglements of Custom and Modernity in Papua New Guinea and Timor-Leste examines the impact of modernising processes of change—globalization, “development,” state- and nation-building—on customary land tenures, and customary communities, in two Pacific countries. Moving between multiple sites, scales, and forms of collectivity, Becoming Landowners explores the entanglements of custom and modernity that emerge from these processes. These entanglements are deeply ambivalent, giving rise to competing cartographies of power. They lend themselves to the diminishing of local autonomy but also, importantly, create new possibilities for reasserting that autonomy, and for rearticulating the forms and sites of authority to which customary connection to land gives rise. Pacific peoples are becoming landowners, the book argues, both in the sense that modernising processes of change compel forms of property relations, and in the sense that “landowner” and “custom landowner” become identities to be wielded against the encroachment of both state and capital. In places where customary forms of land tenure have long been dominant, deeply intertwined with senses of self and relationships with others, land now becomes a crucible upon which social relations, power and culture are reconfigured and reimagined.

This book sheds new light on processes of cultural transformation at work in Oceania and analyzes them as products of interrelationships between culturally created meanings and specific contexts. It examines these interrelationships for insight into how cultural traditions are shaped on an ongoing basis. Following a critique of how tradition has been viewed in terms of dichotomies like authenticity vs. inauthenticity, the book takes a novel perspective in which tradition figures as context-bound articulation. This makes it possible to view cultural traditions as resulting from interactions between people and the ambient contexts. Such interactions are analyzed from the past down to the Oceanian present—with indigenous agency being highlighted. The work focuses first on early encounters, initially between Pacific Islanders themselves and later with the European navigators of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to clarify how meaningful actions and contexts interrelated in the past. The present-day memories of Pacific Islanders are examined to ask how such memories represent encounters that occurred long ago and how they influenced the social, political, economic, and religious changes that ensued. Next, the book addresses ongoing social and structural interactions that social actors enlist to shape their traditions within the context of globalization and then the repercussions that these intersections and intercultural exchanges of discourses and practices are having on active identity formation as practiced by Pacific Islanders.

This book wrestles with Hmong Americans' inclusion into and contributions to Asian American studies, as well as to American history and culture and refugee, immigrant, and diasporic trajectories. It negotiates both Hmong American political and cultural citizenship, rewriting the established view of the Hmong as “new” Asian neighbors. Following a summary of more than three decades' of Hmong American experience and a demographic overview, chapters investigate the causes of and solutions to socioeconomic immobility in the Hmong American community and political and civic activism, including Hmong American electoral participation and its effects on policymaking. The influence of Hmong culture on young men is examined, followed by profiles of female Hmong leaders who discuss the challenges they face and interviews with aging Hmong Americans. A section on arts and literature looks at the continuing relevance of oral tradition to Hmong Americans' successful navigation in the diaspora, similarities between rap and kwv txhiaj (unrehearsed, sung poetry), and Kao Kalia Yang's memoir, The Latehomecomer. The final chapter addresses the lay of the land in Hmong American studies, constituting a comprehensive literature review. The book showcases the desire to shape new contours of Hmong American studies as Hmong American scholars themselves address new issues. It represents an essential step in carving out space for Hmong Americans as primary actors in their own right and in placing Hmong American studies within the purview of Asian American studies.

Although the author first went to Papua New Guinea in 1973, in 2008 it had been ten years since he had been back to Kragur Village, Kairiru Island, where he was an honorary “citizen.” He finds in Kragur many things he remembered fondly, including a life immersed in nature and freedom from 9–5 tyranny. And he again encounters the stifling midday heat, the wet tropical sores, and the sometimes excruciating intensity of village social life that he had somehow managed to forget. Through practicing Taoist “not doing” the author continues to learn about villagers' difficult transition from an older world based on giving to one in which money rules and the potent mix of devotion and innovation that animates Kragur's pervasive religious life. Becoming entangled in local political events, he gets a closer look at how ancestral loyalties and fear of sorcery influence hotly disputed contemporary elections. In turn, Kragur people practice their own form of anthropology on the author, questioning him about American work, family, religion, and politics. The author returns to Kragur again, in 2011, to complete projects begun in 2008, see Kragur's chief for the last time (he died later that year), and bring Kragur's story up to date.

What is globalization? How is it gendered? How does it work in Asia and the Pacific? This book takes a fresh stock of globalization's complexities. It pursues critical feminist inquiry about women, gender, and sexualities and produces insights into changing life patterns in Asian and Pacific Island societies. Each chapter puts the lives and struggles of women at the center of its examination while weaving examples of global circuits in Asian and Pacific societies into a world frame of analysis. The work is generated from within Asian and Pacific spaces, bringing to the fore local voices and claims to knowledge. The geographic emphasis on Asia/Pacific highlights the complexity of globalizing practices. Although the book focuses on global, gendered flows, it expands its investigation to include the media and the arts, intellectual resources, activist agendas, and individual life stories. Ethnographies and interviews reach beyond generalizations and bring Pacific and Asian women and men alive in their struggles against globalization. Globalization cannot be summed up in a neat political agenda but must be actively contested and creatively negotiated. Taking feminist political thinking beyond simple oppositions, the authors ask specific questions about how global practices work, how they come to be, who benefits, and what is at stake.

Transgender identities and other forms of gender and sexuality that transcend the normative pose important questions about society, culture, politics, and history. They force us to question, for example, the forces that divide humanity into two gender categories and render them necessary, inevitable, and natural. The transgender also exposes a host of dynamics that, at first glance, have little to do with gender or sex, such as processes of power and domination; the complex relationship among agency, subjectivity, and structure; and the mutual constitution of the global and the local. Particularly intriguing is the fact that gender and sexual diversity appear to be more prevalent in some regions of the world than in others. This book explores the ways in which non-normative gendering and sexuality in the Pacific Islands are implicated in a wide range of socio-cultural dynamics. It recognizes that different social configurations, cultural contexts, and historical trajectories generate diverse ways of being transgender across the societies of the region, but it also acknowledges that these differences are overlaid with commonalities and predictabilities. Rather than focus on the definition of identities, the book engages with the fact that identities do things, that they are performed in everyday life, that they are transformed through events and movements, and that they are constantly negotiated. By addressing the complexities of these questions over time and space, the book provides a model for future endeavors that seek to embed dynamics of gender and sexuality in a broad field of theoretical import.

Although gossip is disapproved of across the world’s societies, it is a prominent feature of sociality, whose role in the construction of society and culture cannot be overestimated. In particular, gossip is central to the enactment of politics: through it people transform difference into inequality and enact or challenge power structures. This book uses an analysis of gossip as political action to develop a holistic understanding of a number of disparate themes, including conflict, power, agency, morality, emotion, locality, belief, and gender. It brings together two methodological traditions—the microscopic analysis of unelicited interaction and the macroscopic interpretation of social practice—that are rarely wedded successfully. The book approaches gossip from several angles. A detailed analysis of how Nukulaelae’s people structure their gossip interactions demonstrates that this structure reflects and contributes to the atoll’s political ideology, which wavers between a staunch egalitarianism and a need for hierarchy. The discussion then turns to narratives of specific events in which gossip played an important role in either enacting egalitarianism or reinforcing inequality.

This book offers important new perspectives on the violence and unrest that gripped Solomon Islands between late 1998 and mid-2003, a period known as the Ethnic Tension. Based on in-depth interviews and documents associated with the “Tension Trials,” it is the first detailed account of the conflict that engages directly with the voices of the men who joined the rival militant groups. These contemporary voices are presented against the backdrop of the socioeconomic and cultural history of Solomon Islands. The findings provide a refreshing corrective to the pervasive framing of the Isatabu uprising and the Malaitan response as essentially criminal and apolitical activities driven by the self-interest of those who participated in them. Alternative motives for the men who participated in the Solomons conflict are elucidated, foremost of which are their own conceptions of history and of the places of their respective peoples in the historical processes of colonization, development, and nation-building. Uneven development, relative deprivation and rapid socioeconomic and cultural change are highlighted as salient structural causes of the unrest.

Why are islanders so lavishly generous with food and material possessions but so guarded with information? Why do these people, unfailingly polite for the most part, laugh openly when others embarrass themselves? These questions are common in encounters with an unfamiliar Pacific Island culture. This book is intended for westerners who find themselves in contact with Micronesians and are puzzled by their island ways. It is for anyone struggling to make sense of cultural exchanges they don't quite understand. The book focuses on the island culture: the importance of the social map, the tension between the individual and social identity, the ways in which wealth and knowledge are used, the huge importance of respect, emotional expression and its restraints, island ways of handling both conflict and intimacy, the real but indirect power of women. The book begins and ends with the real-life behavior of islanders. It attempts to explain island behavior, as curious as it may seem to outsiders at times, against the overriding pattern of values and attitudes that have always guided island life. The book identifies those areas where island logic and the demands of the modern world conflict: the “dilemmas of development.” Overall, the book advocates restraint—in judgments on island practices, in assumptions that many of these are dysfunctional, and in leading the charge for “development” before understanding the broader context of the culture we are trying to convert.

This book provides an anthropological analysis of the encounter between local residents and tourists in the Trobriand Islands, a place renowned in anthropology and represented in various media as “culturally authentic.” Through an examination of four arenas of interaction between Trobriand Islanders and tourists (formal performances, informal village visits, souvenir shopping, and tourist photography), this monograph explores the relationship of tourism to the commoditization of culture. A critique of concepts of authenticity, tradition, primitivity, and cultural commodification shows how these notions, which have particular meanings as analytical concepts in anthropology, are appropriated and strategically deployed in the discourses of both Trobriand Islanders and tourists. These tropes are employed in ways that fit with prevailing metanarratives which each side holds about the other, and are reproduced both in individual narratives of tourists’ and Trobrianders’ experiences and in their interpretations (often misconstrued) of the lives of cultural others with whom they interact. I argue that cultural commodities in this type of tourism are conceived of as singularities, a special category whose commodity status is downplayed in order to generate an increased sense of authenticity and to perpetuate the myth of a “primitive” economy and way of life more generally. In touristic encounters, experience itself is a sort of commodity, but relationships (real or imagined) are central to investing these experiences with meaning and value. This analysis brings new understandings of the role and significance of authenticity in the anthropology of tourism, as well as how meaning and value are ascribed to the cultural products produced and consumed in the cultural tourism encounter.

Catholicism, like most world religions, is patriarchal, and its official hierarchies and sacred works too often neglect the lived experiences of women. Looking beyond these texts, the book reveals how women practice, interpret, and shape their own Catholicism on Pollap Atoll, part of Chuuk State in the Federated States of Micronesia. It focuses in particular on how the Pollapese shaping of Mary places value on indigenous notions of mothering that connote strength, active participation in food production, and the ability to provide for one's family. The book begins with an overview of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on Pollap and an introduction to Mary, who is celebrated by islanders not as a biologized mother but as a productive one, resulting in an image of strength rather than meekness: For Pollapese women Mary is a vanquisher of Satan, a provider for her children, and a producer of critical resources, namely taro. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception validates and celebrates local notions of motherhood in ways that highlight productive activities. The role of women as producers in the community is extolled, but the event also provides and sanctions new opportunities for women, allowing them to speak publicly, exhibit creativity, and influence the behavior of others. A chapter devoted to the imagery of Mary and its connections to Pollapese notions of motherhood is followed by a conclusion that examines the implications of these for women's ongoing productive roles, especially in comparison with Western notions and contexts in which women have been removed or excluded from production.

This book is based on a fundamental premise: to deal adequately with conflict — and particularly with conflict stemming from cultural and other differences — requires genuine openness to different cultural practices and dialogue between different ways of knowing and being. Equally essential is a shift away from understanding cultural difference as an inevitable source of conflict, and the development of a more critical attitude toward previously under-examined Western assumptions about conflict and its resolution. To address the ensuing challenges, this book introduces and explores some of the rich insights into conflict resolution emanating from Asia and Oceania. Although often overlooked, these local traditions offer a range of useful ways of thinking about and dealing with difference and conflict in a globalising world. To bring these traditions into exchange with mainstream Western conflict resolution, the book present the results of collaborative work between experienced scholars and culturally knowledgeable practitioners from numerous parts of Asia and Oceania. The result is a series of interventions that challenge conventional Western notions of conflict resolution and provide academics, policy makers, diplomats, mediators, and local conflict workers with new possibilities to approach, prevent, and resolve conflict.

Margaret Mead's career took off in 1928 with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa. Within ten years, she was the best-known academic in the United States, a role she enjoyed all of her life. This book explores how Mead was influenced by, and influenced, the meanings of American culture and secured for herself a unique and enduring place in the American popular imagination. It considers this in relation to Mead's four popular ethnographies written between the wars, and the academic, middle-brow, and popular responses to them. The book argues that Mead was heavily influenced by the debates concerning the forging of a distinctive American culture that began around 1911 with the publication of George Santayana's The Genteel Tradition. The creation of a national culture would solve the problems of alienation and provincialism and establish a place for both native-born and immigrant communities. Mead drew on this vision of an “integrated culture” and used her “primitive societies” as exemplars of how cultures attained or failed to attain this ideal. Her ethnographies are really about “America,” the peoples she studied serving as the personifications of what were widely understood to be the dilemmas of American selfhood in a materialistic, individualistic society.

This book explores the extraordinary successes of the peoples who first settled the Central Pacific islands some two thousand years ago. They and their descendants devised social and cultural adaptations that have enabled them to survive—and thrive—under the most demanding environmental conditions. The dispersed matrilineal clans so typical of Micronesian societies ensure that every individual, every local family and lineage, and every community maintain close relations with the peoples of many other islands. Out of this common theme, shared patterns of land tenure, political rule, philosophy, and even personal character have flowed. The book begins with an overview of the region, including a brief consideration of the scholarly debate about whether Micronesia actually exists as a genuine and meaningful region. This is followed by an account of how Micronesia was originally settled, how its peoples adapted to conditions there, and how several basic adaptations diffused throughout the islands. It then considers the fundamental matters of descent and descent groups, and the closely interlinked subjects of households, families, land, and labor. Because women form the core of the clans, their roles are particularly respected and their contributions to social life honored. Socio-political life, art, religion, and values are discussed in detail. Finally, the book examines a number of exceptions to these common Micronesian patterns of social life. The book illustrates the idiosyncrasies of individual Micronesian communities and celebrates the Micronesians’ shared ability to adapt, survive, and thrive over millennia.