Thesis
Marshallese Americans: community and mimesis among transnational migrants
Washington State University
Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
05/2016
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/100877
Abstract
In this article, I will describe the Marshallese community in Spokane and illustrate - using social gatherings, food, housing, and power relations - the process through which Marshall Islanders translate and hybridize American culture so it becomes an acceptable part of Marshallese life and accords with Marshallese cultural models. I will argue that while Marshallese do not have much power to alter the structural realities of life in America, they are engaged in a project of building Marshallese social environments, communities, by copying American practices. Culture is lost in this hybridization process, but it is also preserved through the agency of Marshallese social actors and their cultural priorities within the practical constraints of living in the US. Micronesians are among the least explored migrant groups, likely due to their small numbers. Nevertheless, Pacific Peoples have unique migration patterns, neither permanent nor cyclical, and their practice of maintaining and moving between extended crossborder families is a clear but not completely understood form of transnationalism. Marshallese in particular have elements of forced, economic, health, and familial-based migration in a single cultural group. Throughout this article I ground the theory in stories, taken from three months of intensive participant observation and interviewing in Spokane WA in the summer of 2015.
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Details
- Title
- Marshallese Americans
- Creators
- Jordan Michael Prokosch
- Contributors
- Jeannette Marie Mageo (Chair)Marsha Bogar Quinlan (Committee Member) - Washington State University, Anthropology, Department ofHolly Barker (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Anthropology, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University; [Pullman, Washington] :
- Number of pages
- 44
- Identifiers
- 99900525397201842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis