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 victimized by raiding headhunters in...

The contributors to this state-of-the-art collection are prominent figures in psychological anthropology, and they write about recent developments in this field. Rooted in psychoanalytic psychology, the early practitioners in the forties and fifties concentrated on studying cross-cultural variation in child rearing practices. While tensions between individual experience and collective meanings are still central to psychological anthropology, alongside fresh versions of the psychoanalytic approaches, other approaches to the study of cognition, emotion, and ethnopsychology have been introduced....

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 victimized by raiding headhunters in...

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,...

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,...

This volume presents detailed analyses of the accommodations between chiefs and states in 13 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. This text is concerned with the renewed significance of chiefs, and considers how the discussions and disagreements that surround them are a vital part of debates about identity and power in the Pacific...