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Reviewed by:
  • Pacific Places, Pacific Histories: Essays in Honor of Robert C Kiste
  • Anne Hattori
Pacific Places, Pacific Histories: Essays in Honor of Robert C Kiste, edited by Brij V Lal. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8248-2748-1; vii + 345 pages, photographs, notes, index. US$57.00.

In Pacific Places, Pacific Histories, a distinguished lineup of seventeen Oceanic scholars contribute essays in honor of Robert C Kiste, an esteemed intellectual and advocate of Pacific Islands and Islanders. This compilation of essays performs a richly deserved gesture of appreciation to a rare person whose vast constellation of friendships, collaborations, and beneficiaries extends spatially across the farthest reaches of the Pacific horizon and temporally to past, present, and future generations of native Islanders and Island scholars.

In shaping Pacific Places, Pacific Histories, editor Brij V Lal invited select scholars to reflect on ways in which their grounding in a specific Oceanic place has informed their research. The theme of place is simple yet profound, as Michael Rynkiewich conveys in his reflection, "Place is identity, place is community, and place is life itself" (324). This volume rewards readers with intimate, often moving accounts that provide insight into the dense dynamics of encountering, experiencing, and knowing a place and its people. [End Page 478]

The highly readable, behind-the-scenes accounts offer insightful stories of the intellectual growth and personal development gained by the contributors as a result of their engagement with a specific Pacific locale. As a consequence of each essay's zealous introspectiveness, Pacific Places, Pacific Histories abounds with noteworthy reflections about the methodological and philosophical challenges and rewards that accompany field research. While the volume focuses on Pacific places, these essays collectively forge a place all their own, a space where readers behold each of the prominent scholars as fallible and fragile students in pursuit of a deeper intellectual understanding of the region and a stronger personal relationship with its people.

The volume's contributors—ten historians, five anthropologists, a political scientist, and a geographer—individually reminisce, reflect, romanticize, agonize, and, in the end, contribute captivating essays that attempt to make sense of their sometimes bewildering encounters in often-unfamiliar places. The selected places range widely, from Joakim "Jojo" Peter's childhood beach hangout on his home atoll in Chuuk, to the spatial elusiveness of the migratory Namoluk Islanders, located easily at Guam shopping malls,Hawai'i university campuses, and e-mail chatrooms, as Mac Marshall relates in his contribution. Whether the place selected was the prestigious Pacific Collection at the University of Hawai'i, which Karen Peacock chooses in her graceful essay, or the ever-changing landscape of Rabaul in the wake of yet another transformative cataclysm, which Hank Nelson elegantly represents in his contribution, what results is the sharing of poignant moments and perceptive insights that will stir readers to reflect similarly on the impact of places in their lives.

For these contributors, intimacy with Pacific places has profoundly shaped their scholarship, telling stories and revealing histories that might otherwise be unobtainable. David Hanlon ever-poetically draws the inextricable link between Pohnpei's land and seascapes and its individuals and events, and in the process inspires readers to discover the ethnographer within themselves. In addition to influencing the contours of scholarship, intimacy with Pacific places can profoundly shape personal life narratives. Maipo sorcery and magic, for example, have come to affect Mark Mosko's analytical processes, while Teresia Teaiwa's three-generational affiliation with Mānoa and its cosmology, rain, and surroundings continues to grow deeper in her, now extending to her young son who bears the valley's name. As Kerry Howe expresses, "Experiencing places—the heat and the cold, the dampness and dryness—to be seasick, to eat new foods, to sleep in new places, to interact with new people, to be confused, to feel vulnerable or lost, has the capacity to make history seem messy and complicated. In short, the experience of place has the capacity to humanize both history and historians" (51). Thus the essays emphasize that place is not an incidental aspect of our research, but rather a central component of our physical and intellectual experience as scholars and...

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