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Stories from the Marshall Islands: Bwebwenato Jan Aelon Kein, by Jack A Tobin. PAL Language Texts: Micronesia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, zoos. ISBN cloth, 0-8248-2545-4; paper, 0-8248-2019-3; xiii + 405 pages, maps, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. Written in English and Marshallese. Cloth, US$55.00, paper, US$19.95.
Narratives can make or break a people. At stake are traditioning, identity formation, and cultural creativity. People who forget their own stories risk living out someone else's story.
Stories from the Marshall Islands reveals a treasure held in trust for the next generation by an anthropologist. Jack Tobin has been involved with Marshallese people for a lifetime.
He has been a student, a participant observer, and an advisor, but always a recorder of culture. Now, through narratives, he opens a door to Marshallese identity and spirituality. We have been waiting many years for this work.
This volume is a collection of stories that were recorded between 1950 and 1975. Tobin arrived on Arno atoll in 1950, as a student working with Leonard Mason on the Scientific Investigation of Micronesia project. Later that year, he was hired as an anthropological field consultant attached to the Civil Administration Unit of Naval Operations. Under the Trust Territory Administration, he was the one and only district anthropologist for the Marshall Islands. His work, from 1950 to 1957, included a report on the labor camp called Ebeye Village (1954) and pioneering work on land tenure (1958). After helping train the first class of Peace Corps volunteers for Micronesia, Tobin returned to the Marshalls as community development advisor from 1967 to 1975. His involvement with the relocated Bikini and Enewetak peoples kept him on the line between the United States and the Marshallese people.
All this sets the context for how and when the stories in this volume were collected. By Tobin's own account, many narratives were shared in relaxed moments after work when he could savor a different kind of anthropology, recording stories from the past (bwebu'enato in etto). Tobin tells us where and when he heard each story and who the storyteller (ribwebwenato) was, including short biographies in Appendix A. What he does not give us is the living context (sitz im leben) in which these stories might be told to others. In...