Geoffrey White- Professor Emeritus at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Geoffrey White
- Professor Emeritus at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
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Publications (87)
This review takes up three works that represent recent approaches to the anthropology of memory and affect. Echoing themes in Holocaust literature, a central issue here is the role of violent memory in forging collective identifications and sentiments. Taken together, these volumes suggest a continuing evolution of efforts to theorize the remembran...
Memorializing Pearl Harbor examines the challenge of representing history at the site of the attack that brought America into World War II. Analyzing moments in which history is re-presented—in commemorative events, documentary films, museum design, and educational programming—the book shows that the memorial to the Pearl Harbor bombing is not a fi...
Growing numbers of American travelers are making their way to the landing beaches of D-Day where they find places such as the Normandy American Cemetery that reproduce distinctly American visions of World War II. Travelers passing through Paris also find opportunities to explore sites relevant to French memories of the war - sites that have the pot...
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ham/summary/v027/27.2.white.html
This concluding chapter reviews the issues taken up in this volume, exploring the varied dimensions of fieldwork and the variety of geopolitical fictions that have long facilitated dialogue in the sociocultural disciplines. It returns to key themes repeatedly encountered throughout this book, such as indigeneity, the advent of technology, and perha...
Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book is an anthology of twenty-first century ethnographic research and writing about the global worlds of home and disjuncture in Asia and the Pacific Islands. The stories reveal novel insights into the serendipitous nature of fieldwork. Unique in its inclusion of “homework”—ethnography that directly engages w...
This edited collection explores creative indigenous responses to global forces of change and transformation unfolding throughout the island Pacific. With the major focus on the large islands of Melanesia as well as contributions from Palau, Pohnpei, Rotuma and Australia, the authors in this collection examine connections between discourses of cultu...
F or most of us, the term anniversary connotes something more individual and personal-a wedding anniversary or a birthday, perhaps-than a large public commemoration. As a scholar, I am interested in anniversaries that are recalled by entire communities, especially national communities that inevitably look to history to craft a sense of shared ident...
This commentary discusses the article “The Many Meanings/Aspects of Emotion: Definitions, Functions, Activation, and Regulation” by Carroll Izard (2010). Reading the article from the vantage point of cultural anthropology, these comments applaud its “ethnographic” thrust in explicating conceptual models used by scientists to define and analyze emot...
The fifty-year anniversary of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between Japan and the United States, signed on January 19, 1960, was not exactly a cause for unrestrained celebration. In 2010, contentious disagreements over the relocation and expansion of the American military presence in Okinawa, lawsuits against the Toyota Motor Corpor...
Despite a long tradition of writing on collective representations of the past, anthropology has contributed relatively little to the expanding literature on national memory. Yet ethnographic approaches have the facility to delineate practices that create historical narrative and give it emotive power while keeping in view longer-term political forc...
Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization. John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. 243 pp.
Cultural Memory: Reconfiguring History and Identity in the Postcolonial Pacific. Jeannerte Marie Mageo. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001. 222 pp.
In Colonial New Guinea: Anthropological Perspectives...
It is apparent that the past has a robust future. With the intensification of globalization comes an increase in discourses of the past, accompanied by an expansion of memory studies in the academy. This “memory moment” is generating research on topics that are at once intensely personal and political. Anthropological approaches capable of linking...
Anthropology of the Self: The Individual in Cultural Perspective. BRIAN MORRIS. London: Pluto Press, 1994. xil + 222 pp., tables, bibliography, index.
This paper examines spaces in between the "out there" of collective representation and the "in here" of personal cognition and emotion by focusing on acts of public remembrance that are at once individual and collective, personal and national. Reporting on research carried out at the U.S. national memorial to the bombing attack at Pearl Harbor that...
This chapter explores the social and cultural character of emotion, outlining a model for comparative ethnographic research on the meaning and force of emotions in everyday life. After briefly reviewing differences between psychological and anthropological approaches to the social dimensions of emotion, the chapter introduces the idea of "emotive i...
Emerging from a workshop discussion of problems of governance in Melanesia, this paper discusses the potential for building on indigenous practices to strengthen local institutions. Drawing on the experience of the author as anthropologist and consultant to a United Nations Development Programme project in Santa Isabel, Solomon Islands, the paper f...
In this paper we look at relations between anthropology, cultural studies, and native studies on the basis of their practice in the Pacific, focusing particularly on the history of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i. We draw attention to the absence of Pacific Islanders and, specifically, of Hawaiians as authors, agents, and practitioners of...
Questions of ‘self’ in the research paradigms of developmental psychology raise similar issues to those associated with comparative studies of the self in cultural anthropology. In both cases, long-running theoretical arguments hinge on questions of ‘how much constructivism is enough?’ These questions, in turn, point to methodological choices conce...
The concept of 'mythic history' points to the role of public history as moral narrative, a form of identity discourse that works to create social and emotional meaning. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II represents one such mythicized moment in American national history. This paper examines the int...
Earlier this year the Smithsonian Institution announced that it would replace a planned exhibit on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with a small exhibit of just the plane that bombed Hiroshima (the Enola Gay) and videos of the crew. The announcement was meant to end a year of impassioned public wrangling among World War II veterans, hi...
This collection of essays looks at cultural development programs and policies in three Melanesian countries: Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. With the most intense diversity of indigenous languages and cultures anywhere in the world, Melanesia is also home to some of the most inventive approaches to cultural promotion and innovation....
The field of psychological anthropology has changed a great deal since the 1940s and 1950s, when it was often known as 'Culture and Personality Studies'. Rooted in psychoanalytic psychology, its early practitioners sought to extend that psychology through the study of cross-cultural variation in personality and child-rearing practices. Psychologica...
The chapters in this book, which emerged out of several years of organized reassessment of the field, reflect on an ongoing revitalization indexed by numerous recent collections focusing on the intersection of culture and psychology.
Each variety of psychological anthropology discussed in this book approaches problems of mind, culture, and experi...
For people who live in small communities transformed by powerful outside forces, narrative accounts of culture contact and change create images of collective identity through the idiom of shared history. How may we understand the processes that make such accounts compelling for those who tell them? Why do some narratives acquire a kind of mythic st...
28 cm Includes bibliographical references Oral history and the war : the view from Papua New Guinea / John Waiko -- For king and country : a talk on the Pacific War in Fiji / Brij V. Lal -- World War II in the Solomons : its impact on society, politics, and world view / David Welchman Gegeo -- Remembering the war in the Solomons / Jonathan Fifi‘i -...
This book brings together oral histories from a number of Solomon Islanders who experienced the World War II battles between Japan and the United States and its allies. Involved as scouts, laborers and civilians in the battles the storytellers recorded here provide indigenous perspectives on both the military conflict and on the social context of a...
Dictionary and grammatical sketch of the Cheke Holo language of the Maringe and Hograno regions of Santa Isabel, Solomon Islands
A collection of papers and archival materials from the conference on "Pacific Recollections of World War II" held at the University of the South Pacific Centre in Honiara, Solomon Islands, Jume 29 - July 3, 1987
The papers in this volume, a multidisciplinary collaboration of anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, explore the ways in which cultural knowledge is organized and used in everyday language and understanding. Employing a variety of methods, which rely heavily on linguistic data, the authors offer analyses of domains of knowledge ranging ac...
The objectives of this book are to document practices of understanding persons in a sample of Pacific cultures, to develop analytical strategies for making explicit important relations among concepts used in those practices, and to assess the role those practices and concepts play in social life. In the process we hope to show that the study of eth...
ill., map ; 28 cm Includes bibliographical references Preface / Donald H. Rubinstein and Geoffrey M. White -- Introduction / Geoffrey M. White --Suicide and Attempted Suicide in Contemporary Western Samoa / John R. Bowles -- Suicide in Western Samoa: A Sociological Perspective / Cluny Macpherson and La`avasa Macpherson -- Reducing Suicide in Wester...
Ethnographic and clinical research has described Chinese views of psycho-social distress as characterized by the 'somatization' of illness complaints and the 'underutilization' of mental health services. The hypothesis which states that such observed differences in American and Chinese illness behavior, including health-care decisions, derive in pa...
Illness and medicine are among a limited number of topical domains which cross-cultural researchers have for some time described as organized bodies of cultural knowledge (e.g., Clements 1932; and see Conklin 1972:363–392 for a bibliography). One reason for this is that illness is viewed universally as an intrusive disruption of body, person and co...
A comparison of models of cognitive organization in the personality descriptors of three languages indicates that common conceptual themes underlie the meanings and uses of personality descriptors cross-culturally. Two crosscutting dimensions, interpreted as solidarity/conflict and dominance/submission, consistently organize the interrelation of tr...
A conceptual model of social images depicts the attribution of personal traits to a range of leadership statuses and to a Christian Person by A'araspeakers of Santa Isabel, Solomon Islands. The model suggests that the contrast of mission- and government-type leaders, as well as that of Christian and traditional aspects of A'ara social identity, are...
The conceptual organization of personality descriptors in the A'ara language of Santa Isabel, Solomon Islands, is represented in a combined dimensional and hierarchical model. The model reflects both universal dimensions and cultural ideals described for other Melanesian societies. Variation in descriptor meanings is examined through measurement of...
The title of this book, Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific: The Children of Indigenous Women and US Servicemen, World War II, charts a very specific set of concerns. First, the book’s primary focus is the offspring of American military servicemen and Islander women during World War II, including the close relations that surround those children...
Preface to the collection of papers from the East-West Center Conference on Suicide in the Pacific, 1985
