Anthropology Commons^™

Humanities And Communities: A Dialogue In Pacific Studies, Teresia K. Teaiwa, April K. Henderson

Pacific Studies

This article presents a reflective dialogue between Teresia K. Teaiwa and April K. Henderson, two scholars in Pacific Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. On the occasion of their program’s tenth anniversary, they explore the intersections and tensions between humanities-based academic traditions and their responsibilities to Pacific communities. Drawing on their diverse academic backgrounds and experiences, they discuss the challenges of defining a “humanities approach,” the pressures of neoliberal university structures, and the need for “reflective delay” in knowledge production. They also examine the role of language, narrative, and community engagement in their teaching and research, emphasizing the importance of …

Book Review: Elizabeth Wood-Ellem. Songs And Poems Of Queen Sälote, Hafina 'Ōkusitino Māhina

Pacific Studies

Book review of "Elizabeth Wood-Ellem. Songs and Poems of Queen SÄlote" by Hafina 'Ōkusitino Māhina

Hawai'i And The American West: A Reassessment, Matthew Kester

Pacific Studies

This article explores the complex and often contested inclusion of Hawai‘i in the historiography of the American West. Drawing on the case study of Iosepa, a late 19th-century Hawaiian Mormon settlement in Utah, Matthew Kester examines how Hawai‘i’s historical, cultural, and political ties to Oceania complicate its categorization as part of the U.S. West. He critiques the tendency of Western historians to incorporate Hawai‘i into the narrative of U.S. expansion without fully addressing the implications of American imperialism and Native Hawaiian resistance. Kester proposes a shift in regional perspective that centers Hawai‘i within the Pacific world rather than on the …

Pacific Islands Studies At The University Of Hawai'i: The First Three Decades, Robert C. Kiste

Pacific Studies

This article provides a historical account of the development of Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai‘i (UH) from its inception through its first thirty years. It centers on the contributions of three influential scholars—Douglas Oliver, Leonard Mason, and Norman Meller—who were instrumental in shaping Pacific research and education in the United States during and after World War II. The article traces their biographical backgrounds, academic careers, and institutional roles in building the Pacific Islands Studies Program (PIP), later known as the Center for Pacific Islands Studies (CPIS). It explores the broader context of area studies in the Cold …

Book Review: A.T. Ngata And Hirini Moko Mead. Nga Moteatea—The Songs, Part Four, Edwin Napia

Pacific Studies

Book review of "A.T. Ngata and Hirini Moko Mead. Nga Moteatea—The Songs, Part Four" by Edwin Napia

Recent Pacific Island Publications: Selected Acquisitions, July 2008-December 2008, Riley M. Moffat

Pacific Studies

This list of significant publications relating to the Pacific Islands was selected from new acquisitions lists received from Brigham Young University—Hawai'i, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Bernie P. Bishop Museum, University of Auckland, East-West Center, University of South Pacific, National Library of Australia, Melanesian Studies Resource Center, Center for Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Nijmegen, University of California San Diego, Secretariat of the Pacific Community Library, Center for South Pacific Studies, University of New South Wales, Macmillian Brown Library at University of Canterbury, and the Australian International Development Assistance Bureau's Center for the Pacific Development Training. Other libraries are …

Vol. 32 (2009): Pacific Studies Front Matter 4, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Front matter for the Vol. 32, No 4-Dec 2009 edition of the Pacific Studies Journal.

Vol. 32 (2009): Pacific Studies Full Issue 4, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Pacific Studies is published two times a year by The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, Brigham Young University Hawai‘i #1979, 55–220 Kulanui Street, Lāʻie, Hawai‘i 96762, but responsibility for opinions expressed in the articles rests with the authors alone. Subscription rate is US $26.00 yearly, payable to The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies. The Jonathan Nāpela Center for Hawaiian and Pacific Studies (formerly The Pacific Institute) is an organization funded by Brigham Young University Hawai‘i. The Center assists the University in meeting its cultural and educational goals by undertaking a program of teaching, research, …

Rediscovering Reo: Reflections On The Life And Anthropological Career Of Reo Franklin Fortune, Caroline Thomas

Pacific Studies

Reo Fortune’s legacy to anthropology has been overshadowed by his relation- ships with friends and colleagues, many of whom came to see him as difficult. Professional differences and personality clashes pervaded his career. Despite this, he was once regarded as the foremost anthropologist of his era. Fortune’s contribution to anthropology is reflected in his major publications and journal articles that illustrate the diversity and complexity of his fieldwork.

Guest Editor's Note, Gerald Sullivan, Sharon W. Tiffany

Pacific Studies

PACIFIC STUDIES

SPECIAL ISSUE: The Gang of Four: Gregory Bateson, Ruth Benedict, Reo Fortune, and Margaret Mead in Multiple Contexts

Narrative, Voice, And Genre In Margaret Mead’S Coming Of Age In Samoa, Sharon W. Tiffany

Pacific Studies

My contemporary reading of Coming of Age in Samoa explores Margaret Mead’s experimental ethnography as a textual artifact whose social history may be interpreted within a framework situated in gender, time, and place. Mead’s ethnography appeared to reinforce consumer-culture representations of female alterity and “free-love” in the South Seas, yet her text challenged these popular images with a radical counternarrative. Mead’s case study approach to the problem of adolescence, as well as her fieldwork photographs, created a narrative and visual space that questioned the dominant anthropological discourse of her day. Mead’s woman-centered book, combined with her publisher’s astute marketing strategies, …

Of External Habits And Maternal Attitudes: Margaret Mead, Gestalt Psychology, And The Reproduction Of Character, Gerald Sullivan

Pacific Studies

Some critics have thought of Margaret Mead’s research in culture and person- ality as a mechanical reduction of character types to child-rearing techniques. However, a closer reading of her work reveals that, by 1938, Mead understood character to arise in the social and communicative interactions between caregivers and their charges. For Mead, techniques such as swaddling were powerful means by which caregivers communicated attitudes to children, but those same techniques were not sufficient to either form a child’s character or produce an attitude within a caregiver. This article takes up the examination of this more psychologically dynamic Mead. It attends …

Dreams Of Fortune: Reo Fortune’S Psychological Theory Of Cultural Ambivalence, Roger Ivar Lohmann

Pacific Studies

Reo Fortune’s first book, The Mind in Sleep, published in 1927, considers dreams in which one’s attitudes contradict waking opinions. Fortune was keenly aware of his own conflicting perspectives and abhorred ethnocentrism. He argued that rejected beliefs remain subconsciously. Individuals hold contradictory beliefs using two capacities: logical and emotional representation and connection. The former is more accessible when awake, the latter in dreams. Fortune’s subsequent ethnographic studies attended to dreams and ambivalence. His theory encouraged his rejection of stereotyping by the “culture and personality” school of thought, and can be used as a model of cultural ambivalence with ongoing anthropological …

Writing Lives: Ruth Benedict’S Journey From Biographical Studies To Anthropology, Judith Schachter

Pacific Studies

Ruth Benedict’s early biographical essays illuminate her anthropology and, especially, the humanism that guided her choice of subjects, her style of writing, and her goals in the profession. I examine the biographical essays, written in response to World War I, and then assess the contribution of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, written at the end of World War II. With the speech she made to the American Anthropological Association in 1947, Benedict completed the circle, proposing a new anthropology that would include the emotions, ethics, reasoning, and experiences of individuals. A response to the behaviorist social science of the times, …

Ruth Benedict And The Study Of Thai Culture, Nicola B. Tannenbaum

Pacific Studies

In this paper, I place Thai Culture and Behavior in the context of Benedict’s work and life, American anthropology, and Thai studies. The paper begins with a summary of Benedict’s study and a critique of her Thai ethnography. This is followed with a discussion of its initial reception when it was first published and its later place in biographies about Benedict. Finally, I turn to my initial question of the role of Thai Culture and Behavior in Thai studies. Here I examine the two subsequent anthropological studies of Thailand: Embree’s seminal essay, “Thailand—A Loosely Structured Society,” the first field- workbased …

The Ecology Of The Anthropological Mind: Gregory Bateson’S Influence On Three Late Twentieth-Century Pacific Scholars, Phillip V. Guddemi

Pacific Studies

The influence of Gregory Bateson’s path-breaking ethnography, Naven, is well acknowledged in anthropology, as well as his collaborative work with Margaret Mead on Bali. Bateson’s later work, however, departed from anthropology, as conventionally conceived, to focus on issues of communication, psychiatry, animal ethology, cybernetics, and epistemology. These ideas have been influential for relatively few anthropologists. This essay focuses on the influence of Bateson’s later ideas on three anthropologists, all of them Oceanists: Roger Keesing, Robert I. Levy, and Roy Rappaport. These scholars shared an exposure to Bateson’s ideas prior to their popularization in collected essays published in Steps to an …

Vol. 32 No. 2-3 (2009): Pacific Island Studies Front Matter, The Jonathan Nāpela Center For Hawaiian And Pacific Islands Studies

Pacific Studies

Front Matter for the Vol. 32, No 2-3-Jun/Sept 2009 edition of the Pacific Studies Journal.

Derek Freeman And Margaret Mead: What Did He Know, And When Did He Know It?, Paul Shankman

Pacific Studies

Derek Freeman’s published autobiographical statement and his biographers’ account of his life report that, before he went to Samoa in 1940, Freeman was a cultural determinist strongly influenced by Margaret Mead’s work. While in the islands, Freeman stated that he discovered that Mead was wrong about Samoan culture and felt responsible for refuting her work, thus establishing a linear progression in his critique of Mead from his own first trip to the islands to the eventual publication, some four decades later, of Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (1983). Interviews with Freeman suggest, however, …

Introduction: On Four Anthropologists And Their Histories, Virginia Yans

Pacific Studies

This introduction discusses ten essays concerning Pacific anthropologists Gregory Bateson, Reo Fortune, Margaret Mead, and their colleague, Ruth Benedict. The intellectual and personal engagement of these four social scientists with each other is well known and heavily documented in archival collections: they worked as “before-the-text” collaborators in fieldwork and in formulating culture theory. My Introduction highlights the epistemological and textual strategies the contributors to this special issue employ to describe the “Gang of Four.” These essays demonstrate how a group of contemporary anthropologists think about the past and the history of their discipline. As a remedy for the disruption of …

Clyde Kluckhohn And The New Anthropology: From Culture And Personality To The Scientific Study Of Values, John S. Gilkeson

Pacific Studies

This essay examines Clyde Kluckhohn’s relations with Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Gregory Bateson in two contexts: the school of culture and personality, and the Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life convened during the Second World War. Kluckhohn strongly identified with the Boasian tradition. Enlisting in the Boasian campaign to make Americans more “culture-conscious,” Kluckhohn joined Benedict and Mead as a public intellectual. In this capacity, Kluckhohn sought to clarify the concept of culture and to widen its currency, emphasized the affinity between anthropology and psychiatry, and, after 1945, searched for …

“More Like Fighting Than Like Waiting”: Mead, Method, And The Proper Object Of Knowledge In Anthropology, Maureen Molloy

Pacific Studies

This paper examines the critical reviews of Margaret Mead’s and Reo Fortune’s early books and Mead’s responses to them. It argues that these reviews demonstrate a consensus about proper anthropological practice and the proper object of anthropological knowledge. Mead’s response was to go the offensive. She demonstrated her competence in the traditional fields of anthropology through her authorship of Kinship in the Admiralty Islands (Mead 1934) and her ability to generate “pure” knowledge and to provide historical context in The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (Mead 1932a). Most significantly, however, Mead challenged the consensus about the proper object of …

Indigenous Informants Or Samoan Savants? German Translations Of Samoan Texts In Die Samoa-Inseln, Mary Elisabeth Cox

Pacific Studies

Most studies of Samoan culture and language published since 1900 rely on Augustin Krämer’s seminal ethnography Die Samoa-Inseln. It is unusual for a scholarly work to become so accepted and beloved by an indigenous people, but Samoans hand down copies of Die Samoa-Inseln from generation to generation. They particularly prize the extensive Samoan language texts that appear side by side with their German translations. However, an analysis of Krämer’s personal diaries reveals that his grasp of the Samoan language was at best rudimentary. I suggest that the German translation instead reflect the efforts of highly sophisticated Samoan informants who …

Book Review Forum: Eric Kline Silverman. Masculinity, Motherhood, And Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture And The Iatmul Naven Rite In New Guinea, Shirley Lindenbaum

Pacific Studies

Eric Kline Silverman. Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001. Pp. 264. 2 drawings, 10 photographs, 1 map. ISBN 978-0-472-09757-9 (cloth), US$70.00; ISBN 978-0-472-06757-2 (paper), US$27.95.

Review: Shirley Lindenbaum

Professor Emerita, The Cuny Graduate Center

Omengeredakl: Aesthetics Of Sound And Vocal Music In Palau, Birgit Abels

Pacific Studies

Omengeredakl are group chants sung on the islands of Palau, West Micronesia. They stand out from the rest of the repertoire of Palauan vocal music because of certain musical features nor found in other extant Palauan songs. The distinctly Palauan sound of this song type, and how this "audible locality" is manifested in song, has at times been used extensively in the localization of Self, and at times less so. The article argues that this has led to changes in the popularity of omengeredakl over the course of the last century.

Land Agendas Vis à Vis A Makani (Wind) Discourse: Deconstructing Space/Place Political Agendas In Hawai'i, Sydney Lehua Iaukea

Pacific Studies

This paper analyzes conservation and tourism agendas in Hawai'i as they progressed together in the late 1950s. The two are interconnected and positioned land, people, and culture in particular ways. The silencing of other ways of knowing and interpreting 'āina were intrinsic in the promotion of industry. This paper discusses a "wind discourse" with The Wind Gourd of La'amaomao to interject indigenous readings of space and place in Hawai'i. A reorientation to native recollections of 'āina breaks contemporary social constructs and encourages the resurgence of other ways of knowing self and environment. Herein a Hawaiian wellbeing and identity is strengthened …

Book Review Forum: Eric Kline Silverman. Masculinity, Motherhood, And Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture And The Iatmul Naven Rite In New Guinea, Stephen Leavitt

Pacific Studies

Book review of "Eric Kline Silverman. Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea" by Stephen Leavitt

Book Review Forum: Eric Kline Silverman. Masculinity, Motherhood, And Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture And The Iatmul Naven Rite In New Guinea., Diane Losche

Pacific Studies

Book review of "Eric Kline Silverman. Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea." by Diane Losche

Book Review Forum: Eric Kline Silverman. Masculinity, Motherhood, And Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture And The Iatmul Naven Rite In New Guinea, Paul Roscoe

Pacific Studies

Book review of "Eric Kline Silverman. Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea" by Paul Roscoe

Book Review/Response: Eric Kline Silverman. Masculinity, Motherhood, And Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture And The Iatmul Naven Rite In New Guinea., Eric Kline Silverman

Pacific Studies

Book review/response to "Eric Kline Silverman. Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea." by Eric Kline SIlverman

Book Review: Ron Crocombe. Asia In The Pacific Islands: Replacing The West, Evan Lampe

Pacific Studies

Ron Crocombe. Asia in the Pacific Islands: Replacing the West. Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific IPS Publications, 2007. Pp. 644. ISBN 9789820203884. US$49.00 paper, B/W illustrations.

Reviewed by Evan Lampe, Endicott College