American Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment

Chapter One: Anthropology and Micronesia: The Context

11 CHA PTE R ON E Anthropology and Micronesia: The Context Robert C. Kiste and Suzanne Falgout On Monday, December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, George Peter Murdock called together the faculty and graduate student staff of the Cross-Cultural Survey, Institute of Human Relations, Yale University, and they began the task of assembling information on the former Japanese mandated islands in Micronesia. Items they collected included the ethnographies produced by the Südsee Expedition (1908–1910), directed by Georg Thilenius during the German colonial era (1899–1914), and other German records; a lesser quantity of material (Hatanaka 1979) from the period of Japanese rule (1914 to World War II); and American publications from the mid-nineteenth century to the present (Mason 1985a, 32). Although unforeseen at the time, the work at Yale was only the beginning of the largest research effort in the history of American anthropology and a major program in applied anthropology. This chapter outlines the context in which these and subsequent events unfolded. THE SETTING In the early 1940s, anthropology was still a relative newcomer on the American academic scene. The American Anthropological Association was just over forty years old, and its Fellows numbered about three hundred. About a dozen and a half departments offered a doctorate in anthropology, and six dominated the production of new PhDs. Of the 106 doctorates awarded in anthropology between 1939–1940 and 1945–1946, 87 came from six institutions: Harvard (24), 12 RO BER T C. KI STE AND SUZ ANN E F ALGO UT Columbia (19), Chicago (12), Pennsylvania (12), Yale (11), and the University of California, Berkeley (9). (American Anthropological Association News Bulletin 2 [Nov.] 1948). The Society for Applied Anthropology was just a fledgling organization, its inception predating the disaster at Pearl Harbor by only a few months. The conceptual frameworks of anthropology were largely derived from the Boasian paradigm of historical particularism, with cultural relativism a basic tenet of the discipline. However, as discussed below, centrifugal forces were beginning to erode anthropology’s four-field holistic approach into the subdisciplines of cultural anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and physical anthropology. As George Stocking has noted, cultural anthropology had only recently evolved from ethnology, and it was an American “cultural anthropology ” as opposed to British “social anthropology” (1992, 147–159). Cultural anthropology itself was a product of its North American origins and history. The vast majority of American anthropologists had conducted field research among Native American societies that had experienced severe disruptions. Traditional ways of life had been abruptly ended, and many Native Americans had been resettled on reservations, often far distant from their ancestral homelands. Cultural anthropology’s research agenda was largely one of salvage ethnography. As the traditional past could not be directly observed, it was elicited from the memories of older informants. Ethnographies of the day resembled catalogues with standard entries to be filled: kinship, life crises, religion, folklore, settlement pattern, economics, and so on. The anthropologist ’s task was to describe these elements and traits and arrange them into culture complexes and culture areas. Prior to World War II, the Pacific Islands had already achieved a position of prominence in anthropology because of the work of such figures as Raymond Firth in Tikopia, Bronislaw Malinowski in the Trobriands, and Margaret Mead in American Samoa and New Guinea. For a variety of reasons, particularly a paucity of research funds, fieldwork outside of the Americas was the exception rather than the rule. But given the small size of the profession in the United States at the time, the number of American anthropologists who reached the Pacific was greater than generally appreciated today. Evidence of this can be found in an International Directory of Anthropologists (Third Edition ), published in 1950 under the editorship of Melville J. Herskovits. Fortunately for the concerns of this volume, the data were collected during the immediate postwar years, the period of the greatest intensity of American involvement in Micronesia. Anthropology and Micronesia 13 Seventeen American cultural anthropologists had conducted research in the Pacific before the war, and another ten from the other three subfields had also worked in the region. The seventeen were almost evenly divided between Polynesia and Melanesia.1 With two major exceptions (the research of Felix Keesing [F. Keesing and M. Keesing 1956] and Margaret Mead [1928] in the two Samoas), much of the work in Polynesia in the 1920s and 1930s...