Steadfast Movement around Micronesia: Satowan Enlargements beyond Migration (review)

The underlying and timely theoretical question of Steadfast Movement around Micronesia is how cultures integrate and interpret mobility on their own terms. In Micronesia, where societies are commonly matrilineal—that is, social, political, and economic life and identity are focused foremost on female lines of descent, their land holdings, and named homesites—it seems that women stay and men move to provide labor for their own and their wives' lineages and clans. Altogether, Bautista argues, the question of mobility has been obscured by anthropologists' depictions of these small island societies as being immobile (45). Consequently, this book provides us with an invaluable case study of "[h]ow people from Chuuk move about, and their cultural interpretations of movement itself" (2).

Bautista first encountered Chuukese migrant workers in 1987. Young men from the island of Satowan (which is located in the southern part of Chuuk State, in an island group called the Mortlocks) had sought employment on her father's cucumber farm on Guam. The year before, the four island states of Yap, Chuuk (formerly Truk), Pohnpei, and Kosrae had formed the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), a young nation established in free association with the United States. The status of Freely Associated State (FAS) allowed for "open immigration to the United States and its territories," where FSM people could "live and work freely as a nonimmigrant under a status called 'habitual resident'" (28). Overnight, many Chuukese Islanders moved to the US territory of Guam in search of employment, and by the year 2000 Chuukese accounted for around 5,000 of Guam's 155,000 citizens (28). Guam, Bautista explains, should not be considered a final "destination" of FSM and Chuukese migrants but rather their "reach" (3), a perspective that leaves room for cultural, economic, and human flows between dispersed migrant communities and their place of origin.

Bautista's working experience with Chuukese on her father's farm eventually led her to Chuuk for undergraduate research in sociology, which eventually culminated in the eleven months of doctoral fieldwork in 1997-1998 that forms the basis of this study. Altogether Bautista spent four months in Chuuk, two on Satowan Island, and two in a Satowan community on Chuuk's capital island of Weno, which serves as a hub for Satowanese citizens' movement between Guam and Satowan. Bautista employs two theoretical and methodological underpinnings for this study: The first, circular mobility, is taken from human geography, while the second, the idea of transnationalism, is taken from anthropology and sociology. She relies heavily on both sources of literature throughout her book.

The book is divided into six chapters. The first gives a brief history of Satowan mobility in its historical, economic, and political context from the Second World War to the late 1990s and includes reference to the author's research methods, contact persons, and field experience in the dispersed homesites of Satowanese in Chuuk and abroad (Guam, Chuuk, and Hawai'i). The title of chapter 1 is a famous Chuukese chant commonly used when talking about mobility and migration today: "Fetanin Weno, Sefanin Weno." Bautista explains its meaning literally as describing "the process of moving and returning" (2). (I would portray it proverbially: "Once from Weno, always from Weno.") This chant or proverb simultaneously sums up Chuukese sentiment related to mobility and rootedness. Bautista also introduces the reader to the Chuukese concept of the clan hearth (falang), the heart of a homesite, which remains the center of lineage and clan activities today.

Chapter 2 introduces Guam as the first "reach" for Satowanese and other FAS citizens from the Republic of Palau, the Federated States, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Here Bautista looks at why FSM and other Micronesian citizens have moved to Guam and seeks "to describe the web of social expectations and reciprocal obligations between...