American Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment

Preface

xiii Preface My own fascination with the Pacific Islands began in the mid-1950s when I spent two years in military service in what was then the Territory of Hawai‘i. Later, at a small liberal arts college in Missouri, Lowell Holmes introduced me to anthropology, and his example suggested a career as an anthropologist specializing in the Pacific region. Holmes had recently completed his doctorate with a restudy of Margaret Mead’s pioneering work in Sâmoa. I finished my undergraduate education as an anthropology major at Indiana University, and at some point along the way, my interests began to focus on cultural change and applied anthropology in the Pacific Islands. Given those interests, two options for graduate school stood out above all others: the University of Oregon to study with Homer G. Barnett, and Stanford University to work with Felix Keesing. For a variety of reasons, I chose Oregon and Barnett. My introduction to Micronesia occurred when I became a participant in Barnett’s National Science Foundation–funded project on relocated communities in the Pacific, and was selected to work with the people who had been removed from Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. I began my field research under tutelage of Leonard E. Mason of the University of Hawai‘i who had previously worked with the Bikinians. As part of Barnett’s research design, Mason introduced my wife, Valerie, and me to the Bikinians in June 1963. In the next year, and also as part of the Barnett project, Mason and I collaborated in research with the relocated Enewetak community, also in the Marshall Islands. xiv Preface Back in Honolulu in late 1964, I first met Alex Spoehr when we compared notes about Marshallese ethnography. Later, while writing the report for Barnett’s project (Kiste 1968) and my own dissertation at Oregon (Kiste 1967), I worked briefly with Ward H. Goodenough and David M. Schneider in Key West, Florida, in the training program for the initial wave of Peace Corps Volunteers destined for Micronesia in 1966. While the Florida encounter was brief, the opportunity to “talk shop” with two more of the vanguard of American anthropology in Micronesia was a heady experience for a student still struggling with a doctoral dissertation. Another connection with Mason had enormous consequences for my own career. At a dinner at the Masons’ home in 1964, I first met E. Adamson Hoebel and his wife, Irene, and in large measure, that encounter eventuated in my first faculty appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology , University of Minnesota. Hoebel was departmental chairman at the time, and as a new faculty member I could not have asked for a better mentor. The Minnesota years were interrupted on two occasions by appointments as a visiting professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Hawai‘i, and by a further period of research in the Marshalls. I was also fortunate in that most of my twelve years at Minnesota were shared with Eugene Ogan. I benefited greatly from my discussions of anthropology and Oceania, particularly Melanesia, with Ogan, and we sustained our mutual interest in the Pacific at that northern outpost of American academia. Because of my connections with five of the participants (Barnett, Goodenough , Mason, Schneider, and Spoehr) in the Coordinated Investigation of Micronesian Anthropology (cima), I have been keenly aware of the extent of American anthropology’s involvement in the area. For reasons that should be apparent from this volume, it was perhaps inevitable that my sense of anthropology ’s presence in Micronesia was only intensified when I moved to the University of Hawai‘i in 1978 to direct the Pacific Islands Studies Program, now the Center for Pacific Islands Studies (cpis). On December 7, 1991, a commemoration in Honolulu of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was the first of many ceremonies around the Pacific to mark the fifty years that had elapsed since the events of World War II. Reflecting on such observances, it occurred to me that it would also be an appropriate time to assess the results of American anthropology’s half century of involvement in Micronesia. I first raised the idea of a conference to accomplish this with Karen Nero and Glenn Petersen during the XVII Pacific Science Congress in Honolulu in 1991. Mac Marshall was soon involved in our delibera- Preface xv tions. Conference topics and contributors were identified through further discussions and...