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Transnational Migration and Group Cohesion in Five Pohnpeian Communities
Hubbard, Charles Allen
Hubbard, Charles Allen
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Abstract
Long spared direct incursions by the global economy and colonial occupation, residents of the central Micronesian island of Pohnpei have shifted from being members of a regional center of influence to marginal players on the world stage. From the late-1820s through the mid-1980s, successive waves of traders, whalers, missionaries, and colonial occupiers altered the form of Pohnpeian social institutions, economy, and culture. Historically a place which drew people in, seeking its abundant natural resources, Pohnpei increasingly grows and exports human capital in the form of its own people to the United States as laborers in the global economy. These economic migrants bring with them a culture which, despite many changes in form, retains much of its substance and salience in the lives of individuals. In no small part, Pohnpeians’ commitments to family and their desire for social recognition spur their movement throughout the U.S. sphere. This dissertation focuses on five groups of Pohnpeians in Pohnpei and the U.S., comparing the ways in which these social units generate group cohesion. The process of both community formation and maintenance this research identifies has deep roots in Pohnpeian history and repeats through time, regardless of specific circumstances. Communities on Pohnpei are found in local-level chiefdoms known as sections, groups of 100-200 persons linked to a place-based chiefdom, headed by a chief who awards titles to participants in his section—the majority of whom are often family members. A linked set of factors entailing leadership-family-place-production-chiefdom-titles inheres in community formation and function. These factors repeat in modified forms in the several groups studied: a traditional Pohnpeian chiefdom on Pohnpei, Kolonia (the sole town on Pohnpei), communities of Pohnpeian migrants in Kansas City and separately in Cincinnati, and a group in the U.S. without specific location based on native membership in the Madolenihmw paramount chiefdom of Pohnpei.
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2018-05-31
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University of Kansas
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This item contains archived web content.
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Keywords
Cultural anthropology, Chieftainship, Micronesia, Migration, Pohnpei