American Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment

Chapter Two: Magellan’s Chroniclers? American Anthropology’s History in Micronesia

53 CHA PTER TW O Magellan’s Chroniclers? American Anthropology’s History in Micronesia David Hanlon My title, “Magellan’s Chroniclers,” comes in plural form from the two words that open William Alkire’s An Introduction to the Peoples and Cultures of Micronesia (1977). I use the phrase to introduce my own examination of the relationship between history and American anthropology in the area called “Micronesia”—a relationship deeply affected by a tradition of colonialism that began in literary form with the words written down by Magellan’s chronicler, Antonio Pigafetta, on the sighting of Guam or Guahan on March 6, 1521. I begin my exploration of American anthropology in Micronesia by diverting first to other words written down in London not so long ago. I have read that in 1968 the following question was inscribed on the stall door of a men’s room in the London School of Economics: “Is Raymond Firth real or just a figment of the Tikopian imagination?” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1992, 9). Would it be too irreverent to adjust that question to read: “Are Ward Goodenough, Leonard Mason, and Norman Meller real or just figments of Micronesian imaginations?” Or is an inquiry into the practice of American anthropology in the Caroline, Mariana, and Marshall Islands more appropriately served by a question that asks whether Micronesia is a figment of American and other colonial ethnographies? I use these inversions of a seemingly frivolous query to begin a deeper consideration of American anthropology’s history in the area called Micronesia and some of the very fundamental issues it raises. In addressing American anthropology’s history in Micronesia, I am concerned not so much with charting the historical record—the “facts,” if you will—of anthropological practice 54 DA VID HA NLO N as with reflecting on anthropologists’ understanding of history and their application of that understanding to the study of Micronesian societies. In the pursuit of this task, I seek to do four things: (1) to comment briefly on the more than century-old relationship between history and anthropology; (2) to characterize the still relatively recent convergence of these two academic disciplines as revealed in some of the more recent works by anthropologists in Micronesia; (3) to show how American colonialism affected anthropologists’ use of history in earlier ethnographic studies produced between the immediate post–World War II period and the mid-1970s; and (4) to offer a few comments on what a fuller, more developed history of American anthropology in Micronesia might include. What I am advancing through this last item is a crosscultural history that involves the people of the area called Micronesia as something more and other than objects of social science inquiry. DUELING DISCIPLINES? Much has been written about the uneasiness with which the disciplines of anthropology and history have regarded one another.1 Anthropologists’ early preoccupation with social totality and universal traits, and the structures and functions through which they might be gleaned, contrasted sharply with historians ’ focus on fragmentary evidence, “the complexity of causes, unforeseen consequences, and the small chances that make great events” (Dening 1980, 41). Anthropologists authenticated their findings by the direct observation that fieldwork provided, while historians retreated to archives to discover what they could of times and peoples past. Some forms of anthropological practice were decidedly antihistorical. Representing British functionalism’s pronounced disregard for history and for those schools of diffusionist and evolutionist thought touched by a consciousness of the past, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1952) asserted that history explained nothing at all. French structuralists argued somewhat less vociferously that the pasts of nonwestern peoples were either unknowable or unimportant in the larger scheme of social science investigation. Claude Lèvi-Strauss (1963) dismissed history as a vehicle neither desirable nor possible for the study of primitive cultures. For him, the cultures of primitive peoples centered about the play of universal values as revealed in the organizing structures of those cultures. A pronounced indifference toward nonwestern peoples’ histories was not confined to certain schools of anthropological thought. Conventional historians ’ lack of interest in anything that was not written down and that did not American Anthropology’s History in Micronesia 55 involve war, trade, treaties, or the politics of European nations tended to reinforce the distance between the two disciplines. Hugh Trevor-Roper, the British imperial historian, insisted that only the history of Europeans in Africa was worthwhile and discernible; “the rest,” he wrote, “is...