Laurence Marshall Carucci

The Typhoon of War: Micronesian Experiences in the Pacific War

This work combines archival research and oral history to offer a comparative history of World War II in Micronesia. It seeks to develop Islander perspectives on a topic still dominated by military histories that all but ignore the effects of wartime operations on indigenous populations.

Micronesia's Wartime Generation: Experiences and Memories

In Micronesia, the years of World War II produced dramatic political, economic, and lifestyle shifts as Islanders experienced attacks and invasion, followed by a transition in governance. After more than three decades of colonial rule by Japan, the islands came under American control, first through military occupation administered by the U.S. Navy, then as a U.N. Trust Territory. This article examines how the impact of this historical moment—the transition in power due to military conquest—forever altered the lives of the generation that came to adulthood during the war years, and how that transition is encoded in memory.

Anthropology in the ‘Savage Slot’: Reflections on the Epistemology of Knowledge

During the past decade or two, anthropologists have been reshaping their discipline, reassessing the future of anthropological ways of knowing, and repositioning their work in relation to their field communities and their audiences. A 1997 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) seminar on the ‘Politics of Representation in the Pacific’, convened at the East–West Center by Vilsoni Hereniko and Geoffrey White, presented an opportunity to discuss this development among a group of scholars drawn not only from anthropology but also from the arts, humanities and social sciences. Seminar participants outside the discipline posited a radical and discomforting critique of anthropology by othering its practitioners and marginalising it as an unchanging and homogenising discipline, engaged with reproducing Western-based ideas of the ‘primitive’. Rolph Trouillot (1991) defines this type of disciplinary categorisation as placing others in a ‘savage slot’ (see also Lederman 1998, 436). Although some participants initially rejected the legitimacy of the anthropological voice and ethnographic practice, by the end of the seminar some of these participants had reassessed their stance, agreeing that ‘doing field research’ was of value, even if the modes of writing about these experiences were in turmoil. In retrospect, this seminar offered an opportunity to reassess the positioning of anthropology as a discipline within the multicultural framework of subaltern critique that came to typify academia near the turn of the twenty-first century, and in relation to the neocolonial and postcolonial persons and communities with whom anthropologists continue to interact. This special issue of Anthropological Forum

The Effects and Defects of Nuclear Cosmogeny

Joseph Masco suggests that nuclear weapons have become the icon of American technological superiority in the post-World War II era, and that their manufacture has transformed our worldview. Insofar as this is true, the production, testing, and use of such weapons has exposed the United States of Americas experiment in freedom and equality to some of its most brilliant and most tarnished moments. The five volumes considered in this review explore some of the reflections from that patina and uncover many layers of tarnish that accompanied the transformation of the United States into a nuclear super-power.

Sly Moves: A Semiotic Analysis of Movement in Marshallese Culture

One time, during the days when Etao was a young boy, there was an object which was a play thing of his. The boy, Etao, took the play thing and gave it to his mother to watch, then he ran off to bathe in the sea. Etao’s mother took the toy and placed it under her arm so she would not lose it. Soon though, the toy became uncomfortable, so the mother of Etao took the play object and placed it behind the joint in her knee. It was not fitted to her knee either. Finally, the mother took the play thing (which was in the shape of a vagina) and placed it between her legs. The object fit so well in this location that she could not remove it.