Pacific Places, Pacific Histories

Pacific Places, Pacific Histories

Author: Brij V. Lal

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2004-04-30

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 9780824827489

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Places matter. We are shaped by them, and in turn we shape them physically and imaginatively. They connect us to time and locality, perhaps even to life and death itself. This is a book about places and how our engagement with them--complex, changing, and varied--forms and transforms our understanding of them, of ourselves, of the human condition itself. Pacific Places, Pacific Histories brings together leading Pacific Islands studies scholars and invites them to talk about the places they have inhabited and to contemplate the meaning of that experience. The result is a veritable collage of reflections, distinct and different from each other but moving in their collective impact. Our engagement with places becomes daily more complicated with the transnational movement of peoples, ideas, technologies, and cultures. Global capitalism relentlessly alters established ethnographic assumptions about the meaning and importance of where we are and have been. The essays presented here are about letting go, learning and un-learning, transgressing physical, emotional, and intellectual boundaries. They are about personal quests, narrated in distinctive voices, raising particular concerns. Together they contribute significantly to our understanding of how small islands in a vast ocean enable us to see ourselves and the world around us.


The Ivory Tower and Beyond

The Ivory Tower and Beyond

Author: Susan Cochrane

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-03-26

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1443806250

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There is a tradition of “participant history” among historians of the Pacific Islands, unafraid to show their hands on issues of public importance and risking controversy to make their voices heard. This book explores the theme of the participant historian by delving into the lives of J.C. Beaglehole, J.W. Davidson, Richard Gilson, Harry Maude and Brij V. Lal. They lived at the interface of scholarship and practical engagement in such capacities as constitutional advisers, defenders of civil liberties, or upholders of the principles of academic freedom. As well as writing history, they “made” history, and their excursions beyond the ivory tower informed their scholarship. Doug Munro’s sympathetic engagement with these five historians is likewise informed by his own long-term involvement with the sub-discipline of Pacific History.


American Anthropology in Micronesia

American Anthropology in Micronesia

Author: Robert C. Kiste

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 932

ISBN-13: 9780824820176

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American Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment evaluates how anthropological research in the Trust Territory has affected the Micronesian people, the U.S. colonial administration, and the discipline of anthropology itself. Contributors analyze the interplay between anthropology and history, in particular how American colonialism affected anthropologists' use of history, and examine the research that has been conducted by American anthropologists in specific topical areas of socio-cultural anthropology. Although concentrating largely on disciplinary concerns, the authors consider the connections between work done in the era of applied anthropology and that completed later when anthropology was pursued mainly for its own sake. The focus then returns to applied concerns in more recent years and issues pertaining to the relevance of anthropology for the world of practical affairs. It will be of essential interest to students and scholars of Pacific Islands studies and the history of anthropology.