American Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment (review)

American Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment, edited by Robert C Kiste and Mac Marshall. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8248-2017-7, xx + 628 pages, figures, maps, photographs, tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. US$45.

This book assesses over fifty years of American anthropology in Micronesia. In the introduction, Robert Kiste and Suzanne Falgout sketch the historical, political, intellectual, and professional contexts of American involvement as researchers, administrators, and consultants. From the postwar anthropological commitment to provide data on Micronesian social and political orders to aid the naval and succeeding civilian administrations of the United States Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, research foci change from applied to disciplinary concerns through the 1960s and thereafter. The subsequent chapters follow the introductory format in considering the administrative, political, and local contexts of research on the one hand and the disciplinary trends that influence research agendas and the research results that influence the larger discipline on the other.

David Hanlon's chapter surveys the relationship between history and anthropology in Micronesian research from the colonialist applied focus to the micro-histories of the 1980s and 1990s to the possibilities for locally produced counter-ethnographies by Micronesians. William Alkire sees two streams in postwar research in cultural ecology and ecological anthropology --regional issues such as demographic fluctuations on small islands; the relationship between land tenure, resource use, and population; interisland exchange networks relative to resource distribution and mobility; and disciplinary issues, such as the relationship between cultural and bio-anthropological theories, the applications of system theory to understanding island populations, and so forth. Research findings have had little impact on the larger discipline.

Mac Marshall characterizes the results of kinship and social organization studies in Micronesia as a common, ever-changing set of cultural ideas that are variously combined in different communities, illustrating this in research on siblingship; kinship and descent systems; adoption and fosterage; links between kinship, land, and food; marriage practices; incest rules; and postmarital residence. Here, one sees the shift from classification to processes of constructing and maintaining relationships.

Glenn Petersen's chapter on politics in postwar Micronesia ignores the impact of research on the larger discipline, focusing on how the conditions and conduct of research reveal or mask island political orders and strategies and the colonial context to which they adapt. Petersen sees leadership rooted in kinship and territorial groupings, the Islanders' use of outsiders' political forms to regain self-government through the duality of internal versus external relations, and political anthropologists' concern with understanding both the American presence and indigenous political processes as common themes in postwar research.

Lin Poyer's chapter addresses ethnicity and identity in Micronesia along two categories of issues: interethnic relations (sociologically) and communities' internal and external perceptions of differences between people and categories of people (culturally). Poyer shows how earlier work on the cultural premises that structures perceptions of difference and sameness shape reemerging interest in interethnic relations.

Peter Black's chapter asks why the psychological anthropology research of Spiro, Lutz, Gladwin, and Barnett impacted that subdiscipline but left other kinds of social discourses and practical educational and clinical practice in Micronesia unaffected. The answer lies in anthropological practice, specifically the continuity of research questions and generalizations and the discontinuities of how these practices and results are rhetorically framed.

Karen Nero's chapter on the arts in Micronesia laments ethnographic inattention to the arts, a result of researchers' adherence to western modes of defining art, which explains why the groundbreaking work of Edwin Burrows on performance arts (story, song, dance, and skit) has been ignored until recently, following other work on performance beginning in the late 1970s. Other visual representations have become more important with the growth of local museums and the influence of Micronesian participation in various Pacific arts festivals.

Francis Hezel examines the importance--for organizations, like the church, that deal with these problems--of anthropological research in understanding such problems as juvenile delinquency, suicide, alcoholism, and spousal and...