Geoffrey M. White – författare

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 status as they are told and retold in a variety of contexts and genres? Identity Through History attempts to explain how identity formation developed among the people of Santa Isabel in the Solomon Islands who were victimised by raiding headhunters in the nineteenth century, and then embraced Christianity around the turn of the century. Making innovative use of work in psychological and historical anthropology, Geoffrey White shows how these significant events were crucial to the community's view of itself in shifting social and political circumstances.

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. Psychological anthropology has since developed in a number of new directions. Tensions between individual experience and collective meanings remain as central to the field as they were fifty years ago, but, alongside fresh versions of the psychoanalytic approach, other approaches to the study of cognition, emotion, the body, and the very nature of subjectivity have been introduced. And in the place of an earlier tendency to treat a 'culture' as an undifferentiated whole, psychological anthropology now recognizes the complex internal structure of cultures. The contributors to this state-of-the-art collection are all leading figures in contemporary psychological anthropology, and they write abour recent developments in the field. Sections of the book discuss cognition, developmental psychology, biology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, areas that have always been integral to psychological anthropology but which are now being transformed by new perspectives on the body, meaning, agency and communicative practice.

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 status as they are told and retold in a variety of contexts and genres? Identity Through History attempts to explain how identity formation developed among the people of Santa Isabel in the Solomon Islands who were victimised by raiding headhunters in the nineteenth century, and then embraced Christianity around the turn of the century. Making innovative use of work in psychological and historical anthropology, Geoffrey White shows how these significant events were crucial to the community's view of itself in shifting social and political circumstances.

Long known for its vast geographic and cultural diversity, the Pacific Islands region today is witness to some of the most dramatic histories of decolonization and postcolonial development anywhere in the world. As new nations emerge_and struggle to emerge_political change is everywhere marked by efforts to reconceptualize identities, histories, and futures. In the midst of these transformations, this volume brings together a diverse range of analysis and commentary that challenge tired and simplistic paradigms of Oarea studyO and urge us to rethink the ways we imagine and represent the Pacific. The essays also challenge the conventions of scholarship itself, offering provocative reflections on the politics and ethics of research and writing across disciplines. The authors examine a range of subjects relevant to formations of cultural and regional identity, including the politics and poetics of history, of tradition, and of cultural expressions in literature, film, and the arts. In doing so, their discussions open up new ways of thinking about the Pacific as well as about relations between tradition and modernity, and about processes of Omodernization O and globalization everywhere.

Thirty-five years after the first new Pacific states gained their independence, traditional leaders remain important political actors throughout the region. The political environs of the South Pacific, freshly populated with presidents, prime ministers, members of parliament, and local judiciary officers, are also increasingly crowded with newly visible chiefs. Far from being premodern relics, the chiefs who operate within modern Pacific states today figure significantly in attempts to fashion national identities and manage the direction of political and economic development. This volume presents detailed analyses of the accommodations between chiefs and states in thirteen Pacific societies. In some states, traditional perquisites and political authority have overlapped so that the state is a contemporary form of chiefdom. Elsewhere, chiefs operate as a mechanism of local accommodation to centralized state authority, facilitating state operations in the local community. In still other states, local chiefs have risen up against central authority, leading their communities in opposition to the state and its deprecations.In each case, the chief is a focus for cultural struggle in the border zones of local, national, and transnational politics.

Perilous Memories makes a groundbreaking and critical intervention into debates about war memory in the Asia-Pacific region. Arguing that much is lost or erased when the Asia-Pacific War(s) are reduced to the 1941–1945 war between Japan and the United States, this collection challenges mainstream memories of the Second World War in favor of what were actually multiple, widespread conflicts. The contributors recuperate marginalized or silenced memories of wars throughout the region-not only in Japan and the United States but also in China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Korea.Firmly based on the insight that memory is always mediated and that the past is not a stable object, the volume demonstrates that we can intervene positively yet critically in the recovery and reinterpretation of events and experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of the past. The contributors-an international list of anthropologists, cultural critics, historians, literary scholars, and activists-show how both dominant and subjugated memories have emerged out of entanglements with such forces as nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and sexism. They consider both how the past is remembered and also what the consequences may be of privileging one set of memories over others. Specific objects of study range from photographs, animation, songs, and films to military occupations and attacks, minorities in wartime, “comfort women,” commemorative events, and postwar activism in pursuing redress and reparations.Perilous Memories is a model for war memory intervention and will be of interest to historians and other scholars and activists engaged with collective memory, colonial studies, U.S. and Asian history, and cultural studies.Contributors. Chen Yingzhen, Chungmoo Choi, Vicente M. Diaz, Arif Dirlik, T. Fujitani, Ishihara Masaie, Lamont Lindstrom, George Lipsitz, Marita Sturken, Toyonaga Keisaburo, Utsumi Aiko, Morio Watanabe, Geoffrey M. White, Diana Wong, Daqing Yang, Lisa Yoneyama

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-Geoffrey M. White shows that the memorial to the Pearl Harbor bombing is not a fixed or singular institution. Rather, it has become a site in which many histories are performed, validated, and challenged. In addition to valorizing military service and sacrifice, the memorial has become a place where Japanese veterans have come to seek recognition and reconciliation, where Japanese Americans have sought to correct narratives of racial mistrust, and where Native Hawaiians have challenged their ongoing erasure from their own land. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork, White maps these struggles onto larger controversies about public history, museum practices, and national memory.