Glenn Petersen
Biographic Data
| ID | 3600744 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Glenn Petersen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Glenn |
| FAMILY NAME | Petersen |
| SIGNATURE | PETERSEN G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Baruch College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 87 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
On the Use of Micronesian Oral Traditions to Interpret Sea Level Flux
This comment addresses a substantive error appearing in “Links between climatic histories and the rise and fall of a Pacific chiefdom” in PNAS Nexus . The conclusions that article draws about causal connections among changing sea levels, sociopolitical developments, and oral traditions on Pohnpei are misleading and mistaken
Lorenz Gonschor. A Power in the World: The Hawaiian Kingdom in Oceania
Although A Power in the World examines a relatively short historical moment, its analysis of colonial and imperial dynamics, structures, and relationships sheds considerable light on processes still underway in the Pacific islands. As one who has worked with multiple constitutional conventions, plebiscites and referendums, and legislatures in the old United States Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and represented the Federated States of Micr…
Micronesian Ethnography from a Disordered Soul
A career of ethnographic and political work in the former Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands was sparked by a desire to atone for having fought in the United States' colonial war in Vietnam. This article explores the question of whether pursuing atonement via ethnographic work in itself constitutes a form of colonial exploitation
Traditional Micronesian Societies: Adaptation, Integration, and Political Organization in the Central Pacific
Traditional Micronesian Societies explores the extraordinary successes of the ancient voyaging peoples who first settled the Central Pacific islands some two thousand years ago. They and their descendants devised social and cultural adaptations that have enabled them to survive-and thrive-under the most demanding environmental conditions. The dispersed matrilineal clans so typical of Micronesian societies ensure that every individual, every local…
At the Intersection of Chieftainship and Constitutional Government: Some Comparisons from Micronesia
Indigenous Micronesian political forms closely parallel those of eastern Melanesian and Polynesian societies. Chieftainship integrates aspects of land tenure, kin groupings, status hierarchy, and ideologies of the supernatural. Because so many aspects of social and political economy meet in these institutions, chiefly politics have traditionally been responsive to popular pressures; there is in fact, if not necessarily in myth, very little that i…
"American Anthropology's "Thailand Controversy: An Object Lesson in Professional Responsibility
Finding a Moral Compass for an Anthropological Career
Traditional Micronesian Societies: Adaptation, Integration, and Political Organization in the Central Pacific
Hambruch's Colonial Narrative: Pohnpei, German Culture Theory, and the Hamburg Expedition Ethnography of 1908–10
As part of the Hamburg Ethnographic Museum's South Seas Expedition of 1908–10, Paul Hambruch did intensive ethnographic work on Pohnpei. His three volumes appeared in the 1930s and have generally been well respected by subsequent generations of anthropologists. Careful examination of Hambruch's writing, however, discloses that he was influenced by German racial and ‘Kulturkreis’ theory to a heretofore unrecognised extent. His narrative of Pohnpei…
Micronesia's Breadfruit Revolution and the evolution of a Culture Area
Micronesia was initially settled from at least three quite separate points of origin and comprises multiple cultural and linguistic stocks. It nevertheless manifests a striking uniformity in its sociopolitical organization. I argue that these shared aspects of Micronesian societies diffused out of the Eastern Caroline Islands as a consequence of a prehistoric sociocultural efflorescence driven at least in part by the hybridization of two entirely…
Important to Whom? On Ethnographic Usefulness, Competence and Relevance
This paper portrays critical ethnography in the sense that it explores ethnography's relationships with the larger world in which it is embedded, rather than critiquing methodological or theoretica
At the Edge of the State: Indigenous Peoples and Self-Determination
At the Edge of the State: Indigenous Peoples and Self-Determination. Maivân Clech Lâm. Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, Inc., 2000. 232 pp
Indigenous Island Empires: Yap and Tonga Considered
The indigenous social‐political‐economic spheres whose nexuses were located, respectively, in Yap and Tonga, and which included adjacent islands and archipelagoes, are frequently referred to as ‘empires’. This work summarises and examines historical and ethnographic data on these two cases, and then compares them both with one another and with more general concepts of empire. While stressing that these instances only remotely resemble modern empi…
American Anthropology in Micronesia: An Assessment
Strategic location and sovereignty: Modern micronesia in the historical context of American expansionism
The historical and political geographies of strategic areas are commonly formulated in terms of those who define them as strategic. When the Micronesian islands are considered, the routes upon which they lie are emphasised and analyses are formulated in terms of seaborne empires or with reference to the colonial histories of the powers that have contested possession of the islands. This essay frames the matter of Micronesia's location in Micrones…
Colonialism as a Fractured ProjectColonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government.Nicholas Thomas
Power Corrupts — Does Corruption Empower
Reclaiming Rousseau: The government of Poland's Relevance for modern anthropology
More Than a Living: Fishing and the Social Order on a Polynesian Atoll. Michael D. Lieber. Conflict and Social Change series. SCOTT WHITEFORD and William Derman, series eds
The Complexity Of Power, The Subtlety Of Kava
La consommation de kava lors de differentes ceremonies et rituels (et depuis peu dans les bars) permet de lier culturellement les trois parties de l'Oceanie (Polynesie, Melanesie et Micronesie). A Pohnpei dans les Iles Carolines orientale, le kava sert a la fois a marquer et a estomper les rangs et la hierarchie sociale, sexuelle et politique. Le respect a l'egard de cette boisson est toujours de mise et sa preparation suit des regles precises me…
The Constitution of the Marshall Islands: Its Drafting and Current Operations
The United States and the Pacific Islands
Foreword Prefatory Note Summary Oceania: The Strategic Environment Foreign Affairs, Security, and Regionalism Regional Issues and Challenges U.S. Interests and Objectives in the Pacific Islands U.S. Policy in the North Pacific U.S. Policy in the South Pacific Australia, New Zealand, and Other External Powers The Soviet Union and the Pacific Islands U.S. Policy: Recommendations and Conclusions Notes Index
Labor in the Puerto Rican Economy
Labor in the Puerto Rican Economy. Carlos E. Santiago. Westport: Praeger, 1992. xx + 174pp. $42.95 (cloth). ISBN 0–275–94135–3
Capitalism in Colonial Puerto Rico
Capitalism in Colonial Puerto Rico. TERESITA MARTINEZ‐VERGNE. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992. xiv + 189 pp., photographs, maps, figures, bibliography, index. $27.95 (cloth). ISBN0–8130–1110–8
Labor in the Puerto Rican Economy: Labor in the Puerto Rican Economy
Anthropologists Versus Missionaries: The Influence of Presuppositions [and Comments and Reply]
Although a missionary once served as president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, anthropological enculturation commonly includes categorizing missionaries as enemies. The conditioning seems to be more covert than overt, since anthropology texbooks seldom deal specifically with missionary activity and few ethnographies contain condemnations of missionaries. Two presuppositions which may influence the antimissionary attitude are (1) that the …
Kanengamah and Pohnpei's Politics of Concealment
Kanengamah is an abstract quality and a manner of behaving fundamental to social life on Pohnpei, in Micronesia's Eastern Caroline Islands. It entails the habit of concealment; most social interactions are conditioned by the expectation that all parties are engaged in dissembling. Kanengamah enables Pohnpeians simultaneously to exalt their leaders and to remain remarkably free from their authority. As a consequence, "hierarchical" and "egalitaria…
Culture, Environment, and the Ills of Adaptationism [and Comments and Reply]
The concept of "adaptation," properly used to describe the relation between "culture" and man's physiological needs, is commonly employed in anthropology to refer to the relationship between human sociocultural institutions and "nature." An attempt is made here to expose the "adaptationist programme" behind this latter conception, the main components of which are (1) the notion of an all-embracing ecosystem whose evolution is subject to (2) self-…
Ponapean matriliny: Production, Exchange, and the Ties That Bind
Matriliny is commonly associated in ethnological theory with matrilocality and female subsistence tasks and is assumed to break down when changes occur in residence, land tenure, and the division of labor. Examination of Ponapean matriliny, which has apparently depended upon neither matrilocality nor female subsistence production, suggests that, alternatively, matrilineal organization plays an especially effective role in forging social and excha…
Micronesia's Breadfruit Revolution and the evolution of a Culture Area
Micronesia was initially settled from at least three quite separate points of origin and comprises multiple cultural and linguistic stocks. It nevertheless manifests a striking uniformity in its sociopolitical organization. I argue that these shared aspects of Micronesian societies diffused out of the Eastern Caroline Islands as a consequence of a prehistoric sociocultural efflorescence driven at least in part by the hybridization of two entirely…
Strategic location and sovereignty: Modern micronesia in the historical context of American expansionism
The historical and political geographies of strategic areas are commonly formulated in terms of those who define them as strategic. When the Micronesian islands are considered, the routes upon which they lie are emphasised and analyses are formulated in terms of seaborne empires or with reference to the colonial histories of the powers that have contested possession of the islands. This essay frames the matter of Micronesia's location in Micrones…
External politics, internal economics, and Ponapean social formation
Long-term transformations in Pacific island economies are analyzed in the perspective of their colonial experiences. Specifically, the modern political economy of Ponape, in the Caroline Islands, is compared with typical peasant economies. It is argued that historical changes in the Pacific do not necessarily produce the peasantlike societies frequently assumed to exist there and that development programs must take these conditions into account w…
Indigenous Island Empires: Yap and Tonga Considered
The indigenous social‐political‐economic spheres whose nexuses were located, respectively, in Yap and Tonga, and which included adjacent islands and archipelagoes, are frequently referred to as ‘empires’. This work summarises and examines historical and ethnographic data on these two cases, and then compares them both with one another and with more general concepts of empire. While stressing that these instances only remotely resemble modern empi…
Finding a Moral Compass for an Anthropological Career
Culture, Kin and Cognition in Oceania: Essays in Honor of Ward H. Goodenough
The Ponapean Culture of Resistance
Research Article| May 01 1984 The Ponapean Culture of Resistance Glenn Petersen Glenn Petersen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (1984) 1984 (28-30): 347–366. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1984-28-30-347 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Glenn Petersen; The Ponapean Culture of Resistance. Radical History Review 1 May 1984; 1984 (28-30): 347–366. doi: https:/…
At the Intersection of Chieftainship and Constitutional Government: Some Comparisons from Micronesia
Indigenous Micronesian political forms closely parallel those of eastern Melanesian and Polynesian societies. Chieftainship integrates aspects of land tenure, kin groupings, status hierarchy, and ideologies of the supernatural. Because so many aspects of social and political economy meet in these institutions, chiefly politics have traditionally been responsive to popular pressures; there is in fact, if not necessarily in myth, very little that i…
Important to Whom? On Ethnographic Usefulness, Competence and Relevance
This paper portrays critical ethnography in the sense that it explores ethnography's relationships with the larger world in which it is embedded, rather than critiquing methodological or theoretica
The Complexity Of Power, The Subtlety Of Kava
La consommation de kava lors de differentes ceremonies et rituels (et depuis peu dans les bars) permet de lier culturellement les trois parties de l'Oceanie (Polynesie, Melanesie et Micronesie). A Pohnpei dans les Iles Carolines orientale, le kava sert a la fois a marquer et a estomper les rangs et la hierarchie sociale, sexuelle et politique. Le respect a l'egard de cette boisson est toujours de mise et sa preparation suit des regles precises me…
Techniques of Survey Analysis
Journal Article TECHNIQUES OF SURVEY ANALYSIS Get access Gene Petersen Gene Petersen Bureau of Social Science Research Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 39, Issue 3, FALL 1975, Pages 420–422, https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/39.3.420 Published: 01 January 1975
Breadfruit or Rice: The Political Economics of a Vote in Micronesia
External politics, internal economics, and Ponapean social formation
Long-term transformations in Pacific island economies are analyzed in the perspective of their colonial experiences. Specifically, the modern political economy of Ponape, in the Caroline Islands, is compared with typical peasant economies. It is argued that historical changes in the Pacific do not necessarily produce the peasantlike societies frequently assumed to exist there and that development programs must take these conditions into account w…
Anthropologists Versus Missionaries: The Influence of Presuppositions [and Comments and Reply]
Although a missionary once served as president of the Royal Anthropological Institute, anthropological enculturation commonly includes categorizing missionaries as enemies. The conditioning seems to be more covert than overt, since anthropology texbooks seldom deal specifically with missionary activity and few ethnographies contain condemnations of missionaries. Two presuppositions which may influence the antimissionary attitude are (1) that the …
Ponapean matriliny: Production, Exchange, and the Ties That Bind
Matriliny is commonly associated in ethnological theory with matrilocality and female subsistence tasks and is assumed to break down when changes occur in residence, land tenure, and the division of labor. Examination of Ponapean matriliny, which has apparently depended upon neither matrilocality nor female subsistence production, suggests that, alternatively, matrilineal organization plays an especially effective role in forging social and excha…
Culture, Environment, and the Ills of Adaptationism [and Comments and Reply]
The concept of "adaptation," properly used to describe the relation between "culture" and man's physiological needs, is commonly employed in anthropology to refer to the relationship between human sociocultural institutions and "nature." An attempt is made here to expose the "adaptationist programme" behind this latter conception, the main components of which are (1) the notion of an all-embracing ecosystem whose evolution is subject to (2) self-…
The Ponapean Culture of Resistance
Research Article| May 01 1984 The Ponapean Culture of Resistance Glenn Petersen Glenn Petersen Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (1984) 1984 (28-30): 347–366. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1984-28-30-347 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Glenn Petersen; The Ponapean Culture of Resistance. Radical History Review 1 May 1984; 1984 (28-30): 347–366. doi: https:/…
Atoll Economy: Social Change in Kiribati and Tuvalu. W. H. Geddes, Anne CHAMBERS, Betsy Sewell, Roger Lawrence, and RAY Watters (Islands on the Line: Team Report)
Redistribution in a Micronesian Commercial Economy
Affluence and Cultural Survival: 1981 Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society . Richard F. Salisbury and Elisabeth Tooker
Culture, Kin and Cognition in Oceania: Essays in Honor of Ward H. Goodenough
The VietNam war as an exemplar of American culture
Book Note
Unemployed & Underemployed
Labor in the Puerto Rican Economy
Labor in the Puerto Rican Economy. Carlos E. Santiago. Westport: Praeger, 1992. xx + 174pp. $42.95 (cloth). ISBN 0–275–94135–3
Capitalism in Colonial Puerto Rico
Capitalism in Colonial Puerto Rico. TERESITA MARTINEZ‐VERGNE. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992. xiv + 189 pp., photographs, maps, figures, bibliography, index. $27.95 (cloth). ISBN0–8130–1110–8
Labor in the Puerto Rican Economy: Labor in the Puerto Rican Economy
Capitalism in Colonial Puerto Rico: Capitalism in Colonial Puerto Rico
Kanengamah and Pohnpei's Politics of Concealment
Kanengamah is an abstract quality and a manner of behaving fundamental to social life on Pohnpei, in Micronesia's Eastern Caroline Islands. It entails the habit of concealment; most social interactions are conditioned by the expectation that all parties are engaged in dissembling. Kanengamah enables Pohnpeians simultaneously to exalt their leaders and to remain remarkably free from their authority. As a consequence, "hierarchical" and "egalitaria…
The United States and the Pacific Islands
Foreword Prefatory Note Summary Oceania: The Strategic Environment Foreign Affairs, Security, and Regionalism Regional Issues and Challenges U.S. Interests and Objectives in the Pacific Islands U.S. Policy in the North Pacific U.S. Policy in the South Pacific Australia, New Zealand, and Other External Powers The Soviet Union and the Pacific Islands U.S. Policy: Recommendations and Conclusions Notes Index
Power Corrupts — Does Corruption Empower
Reclaiming Rousseau: The government of Poland's Relevance for modern anthropology
More Than a Living: Fishing and the Social Order on a Polynesian Atoll. Michael D. Lieber. Conflict and Social Change series. SCOTT WHITEFORD and William Derman, series eds
The Complexity Of Power, The Subtlety Of Kava
La consommation de kava lors de differentes ceremonies et rituels (et depuis peu dans les bars) permet de lier culturellement les trois parties de l'Oceanie (Polynesie, Melanesie et Micronesie). A Pohnpei dans les Iles Carolines orientale, le kava sert a la fois a marquer et a estomper les rangs et la hierarchie sociale, sexuelle et politique. Le respect a l'egard de cette boisson est toujours de mise et sa preparation suit des regles precises me…
The Constitution of the Marshall Islands: Its Drafting and Current Operations
Sociology (26 works) · History (20 works) · Political science (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Geography (17 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (16 works) · Anthropology (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Ethnology (13 works) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (13 works)