That said and recognizing that Petrou writes as a human geographer rather than as an anthropologist, we would wish for a thicker description of Paamese experience in urban and rural settings. What was “Paamese” about those from Paama living in Port Vila? More specifically, was being a Paamese primarily a matter of geographical origin, or were there also diacritical cultural factors? If the latter, have markers of Paamese cultural identity, whether in town or on the island, changed over time? Correspondingly, we would want to know more about Paamese cultural ideas, past and present, that underpin sorcery and leadership. Perhaps, we wonder, these ideas have become less elaborated and culturally distinctive in town and village. Our Chambri friend, John, would surely recognize that the demands for sharing, described by Rasmussen and Petrou in their valuable studies, have long been significant for Pacific Islanders. (Many social scientists working among these Islanders, we venture, have considerable experience of singaut.) Both aggravating and gratifying for the successful, remittances ensured that someone would be there if you did something big. And, for those just getting by, remittances ensured that someone would be there to help, lest you go under.

A member of the editorial board of the Journal of Pacific History from 2012–14, Teresia K. Teaiwa left this earth on 21 March 2017. Two subsequent commemorations on the island of O‘ahu, along with ...

Pacific history has been rediscovered of late by those seeking to incorporate the region into more transnational, global, and world histories. There is much good to be derived from regional and comparative approaches that link Pacific pasts to larger historical processes and to the boundary-defying movement of peoples, goods, and ideas. Pacific history needs very much to be in conversation with historians and theorists from elsewhere. There is also the issue of recovery. Drawing inspiration from the works of Greg Dening, Vince Diaz, and others, I address the persisting need for the recovery of deeper Oceanic pasts that bear on our shared if unequal present—an effort made even more necessary by the generalizations and omissions that come with a globalizing approach to Islands' pasts. In this effort at recovery, I look to imagination, discursive flourish, indigenous knowledge, and Deep Time as integral methodologies that offer the possibility of transcending the conventions of historical research in the Pacific on a voyage that is ultimately about liberation.

Reviewed by: Summoning the Powers Beyond: Traditional Religions in Micronesia by Jay Dobbin David Hanlon Summoning the Powers Beyond: Traditional Religions in Micronesia, by Jay Dobbin with Francis X Hezel, sj. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011. isbn 978-0-8248-3203-2, 286 pages, figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, us$55.00. Jay Dobbin, who passed away the year this book was published, identified the goal of his study as a descriptive reconstruction of preindustrial Micronesian religions. It was a formidable task, given the dynamic and varied nature of those belief systems prior to contact, their replacement or diminishment resulting from the widespread adoption of Christianity, and the fragmentary nature of the sources available. Dobbin opted for an older anthropological approach to his topic. He employed a Geertzian understanding of religion as a symbolic meaning system that provides explanation and guidance to human beings. In short, Dobbin sought to understand the religious symbols and accompanying beliefs and practices that gave meaning to Micronesians’ world. The value of this study lies in its presentation of the dynamism, fluidity, and complexity of Micronesian spirituality before and at the time of engagement with continental voyagers, missionaries, researchers, and colonial officials. The book begins with an introductory chapter that provides definitions; identifies and critiques the ethnographic, linguistic, and archaeological sources on which it draws; and offers an overview of Micronesian religions. There follow individual chapters on the Chuukic-speaking islands, Pohnpei, Kosrae, the Marshalls, Yap, Palau, [End Page 566] and Kiribati and Nauru. As is so often the case with studies of Micronesian histories and cultures, the Mariana Islands are largely omitted because of their earlier, extensive, prolonged, and assumedly fatal exposure to Spanish colonialism. A concluding chapter provides a summary of the similarities and variations that characterize Micronesian religions. According to Dobbin, what made Micronesian religions “Micronesian” were shared or similar beliefs in a hierarchy of deities and spirits; the order and organization of varying cosmological schemes; common ritual patterns that infuse the practices of divination, healing, and curing; an understanding of death as a rite of passage to another place; and a general wariness regarding the spirits of the dead. Dobbin’s chapter on the Chuukicspeaking islands that stretch from Tobi in the west to the Mortlocks in the east is his most detailed and compelling. These islands evidence what anthropologist Mac Marshall has termed the essence of “Micronesianness.” The genealogy of this region’s gods is remarkably consistent. The sky god Wonofáát or Olofat is found across this arc of islands, though his personality and actions vary. The prevalence of sacred places and the classes of people, often priests, who inhabited or served these places constitute two other common features of Micronesian religions. Dobbin, himself a Roman Catholic priest, concluded that Micronesian religions were not ones of excessive ritual or religiously sanctioned taboos. He understood them as religions of life that focused on the practicalities and necessities of daily living and that possessed a devotion to a variety of art forms ranging from canoe building to dance, tattooing, and weaving. Dobbin believed that “the gentle nature of Micronesian religion is a considerable achievement in a world that has sacralized torture, death, cannibalism, and mass human sacrifice” (221). Dobbin was very much a believer in Micronesia. He made clear at the outset of his study that there exists a sufficient degree of cultural similarity among the islands to speak confidently of a Micronesia and its religions. The assertion ultimately comes across as strained, at least to this reader. Differences tend to be minimized as variations in an attempt to maintain the integrity and viability of the term “Micronesia.” The linguistic and cultural differences that separate Yap, Palau, and the Marianas from the rest of the region are largely muted. The distinctiveness of Palau’s precontact religion, with its emphasis on the wealth and advantage to be derived from ancestral spirits, is too quickly put aside in favor of features that resemble those of other islands. Other differences are examined but without challenging the thematic concept of a Micronesia. There are the very particular political roles assumed by Pohnpeian priests at such prominent religious sites as Salapwuk, Wone, and...

Remembering Greg Dening David Hanlon (bio) Greg Dening, historian and ethnographer of Oceania, passed away on 13 March 2008 while on a visit to Tasmania. The effects of his scholarship on the histories and ethnographies of the region are profound. Many of us, however, grieve the loss of not only a world-renowned scholar but also a generous colleague, encouraging mentor, and close friend. Greg touched lives everywhere, including here in Hawai'i. We would like to think that Hawai'i was one of his special places. Donna Merwick, Greg's wife and an acclaimed historian of colonial New York, wrote in a recent letter that Honolulu was an intellectual home for him, "a place of stimulation, challenge, and always welcome" (see figure 1). After completing his doctoral studies at Harvard University in 1967 under Douglas Oliver, Greg took up his first academic appointment at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa, where he taught for both the history and anthropology departments. Accounts of Greg's efforts to teach cultural history in Hawai'i can be found in his 1997 article, "Empowering Imaginations," for The Contemporary Pacific and also in his more recent book, Beach Crossings. He returned numerous times over the years, including a six-month visit as the John A Burns Distinguished Visiting Professor of History for the spring 1981 semester. Greg's support for The Contemporary Pacific was early and steadfast. He advocated for the journal's founding, wrote for its inaugural issue, served as a regular contributor and reviewer, and provided the words of endorsement that long graced our promotional brochure. There already exist scholarly analyses of Greg's work; the years to come will undoubtedly witness the publication of many more. The essays presented in this collection are by those who encountered Greg either while he was at UH Mānoa or later, through Greg's connections with others here. They are written by Greg's peers and students, and offer varied reflections [End Page 299] over disciplinary and generational boundaries. They tell of common causes, collegial exchanges, scholarly guidance, and inspiration that could at times be spiritual. Ben Finney shares an early story about the professional intimidation that he and Greg were subjected to, for challenging the then-reigning belief that Polynesians could not have purposefully explored and settled the Pacific Islands. Marshall Sahlins writes of the adoption of Greg's "Melbourne Method" at the University of Chicago and of their mutually enriching conversations about Native and Stranger that hybridized their respective anthropologies. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Donna Merwick and Greg Dening during the "Challenges to Perform" seminar at the Australian National University, 2004. Photo by Greg Dvorak. Greg's time in Hawai'i and the effects of his personal and intellectual presence on Pacific studies at Mānoa are the subject of David Hanlon's essay. Vince Diaz underscores the contribution of Greg's scholarship to the doing of Native histories; he recounts too the critical rigor and encouragement with which Greg read his soon-to-be published work on colonial-ism, Catholicism, and indigeneity in Guam. Greg's commitment to Native [End Page 300] scholarship and the efficacy of his "bound-together" history on the more recent Hawaiian past would have been the focus of Kanalu Young's writing; Kanalu emphasized the importance of Greg's work to the doing of Hawaiian history from his bed at the Queen's Hospital in early August 2008. Tragically, the deep sense of loss engendered by Greg's death here in Hawai'i has been compounded by Kanalu's own untimely passing. In the latter years of his career, Greg emphasized the role of performance in the presentation of knowledge about the past; he exhorted his students to be bold, imaginative, and experimental in the histories that they crafted. Katerina Teaiwa and Greg Dvorak provide highly personal accounts of their participation in the "Challenges to Perform" seminar that Greg and Donna offered regularly through the Australian National University's Centre for Cross-Cultural Research. Teaiwa reflects on writing as an embodied process that proved particularly painful during the initial drafting of her dissertation; she found wonderfully liberating Greg's emphasis...

Paul Rainbird has written on the assumed absence of certain cultural practices that informed Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville's identification of Micronesia as a definable and major area of the Pacific. What followed d'Urville's misnaming was the ethnological reification of Micronesia as a coherent cultural entity. Colonialism, most recently and most particularly American colonialism, has contributed to the reification of this anthropological construct in politically significant and intellectually constraining ways. This essay reflects on a variety of linked histories—anthropological, colonial, and literary—that help explain the area's limited connections to the rest of contemporary Oceania and its related, more general circumscription from the field of Pacific studies. It also focuses on recent writings that destabilize the term Micronesia in favor of more localized histories, ethnographies, and literature—a process that is consistent with Hau'ofa's vision of "our sea of islands."

At the time of this writing in March, 2006, Tosiwo Nakayama lies gravely ill in Waipahu, a former plantation town on the island of O‘ahu flattened, paved over and built upon with shopping malls and track houses. Japanese and later Filipino immigrants once worked the sugar cane fields of Waipahu. More recently, the town has become home to an increasing number of people from Micronesia; most notably those from Chuuk and the Marshall Islands. Their presence is the result of provisions within the Compact of Free Association between the United States and the governments of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and the Republic of the Marshall Islands that allow for the free movement of Micronesians into the United States and its territories. Tosiwo Nakayama, the first president of the FSM, helped negotiate that compact.

In 1851, two young Americans, Leavitt Hunt and Nathan Flint Baker, extended their Grand Tour to include Egypt, the Holy Land and Greece. In the course of this trip the men successfully produced over sixty calotype records of their journey. In introducing this long‐forgotten work, the author explores the visual approach of the artists and the potential commercial reception of calotype images in the United States.

Journal Article Jonathan Lamb. Preserving the Self in the South Seas 1680–1840. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 345. Cloth $52.00, paper $18.00 Get access Lamb Jonathan. Preserving the Self in the South Seas 1680–1840. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 345. Cloth $52.00, paper $18.00. David Hanlon David Hanlon University of Hawai'i, Manoa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 108, Issue 5, December 2003, Pages 1435–1436, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/108.5.1435 Published: 01 December 2003

Journal Article Robert J. Foster, editor. Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1995. Pp. vi, 280. $47.50 Get access Foster Robert J., editor. Nation Making: Emergent Identities in Postcolonial Melanesia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1995. Pp. vi, 280. $47.50. David Hanlon David Hanlon University of Hawai'i, Mänoa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 102, Issue 4, October 1997, Pages 1212–1213, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/102.4.1212 Published: 01 October 1997

Journal Article Anne Salmond. Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642–1772. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1991. Pp. 477. $38.00 Get access Salmond Anne. Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans, 1642–1772. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1991. Pp. 477. $38.00. David Hanlon David Hanlon University of Hawaii, Manoa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 98, Issue 5, December 1993, Pages 1665–1666, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/98.5.1665-a Published: 01 December 1993

o. h. k. spate. The Pacific since Magellan. Volume 3, Paradise Found and Lost. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1988. Pp. xxii, 410. $59.50 Get access Spate O. H. K.. The Pacific since Magellan. Volume 3, Paradise Found and Lost. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1988. Pp. xxii, 410. $59.50. David Hanlon David Hanlon University of Hawaii, Manoa Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 96, Issue 1, February 1991, Pages 135–136, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/96.1.135-a Published: 01 February 1991