“W e don’t need money on Epoon [Ebon].” That is a phrase I heard frequently during fieldwork on Epoon in 2014. It captures a widespread conception of rural atoll life as characterized by a form of subsistence living in which people grow, catch, and harvest natural resources through cooperative work.1 I found the statement puzzling the first few times I heard it, since money has existed on the atoll for more than 150 years. Spending money is a natural part of everyday life on Epoon, as it is elsewhere in the Marshall Islands. Still, the statement rang true for most ri-Epoon (Epoon people), not in the sense of absolute fact but in the way it set up an implicit distinction between rural and urban life.
Alluding to the relatively equal access to natural resources on rural atolls, the phrase allowed ri-Epoon to contrast themselves favorably to town dwellers in any of the urban centers, with Mājro (Majuro) as the most common reference. Relative to Mājro residents, ri-Epoon were self-reliant because they grew, caught, and harvested their own food, thereby minimizing their need for money. The implication is that, relative to urbanites, ri-Epoon have a strong affiliation to a culturally meaningful way of life, in which social life is characterized by a form of togetherness (ippān doon) constituted by mutual aid, shared values, and intimate connections to the land and environment.
This is a way of life with strong connections to custom and tradition, captured in phrases like wāween m̗anit in M̗ajel̗ ([life] according to Marshallese custom), m̗antin M̗ajel̗ (the Marshallese way),2 or simply mour in M̗ajel̗ (life in the Marshall Islands). While to some extent seeking authentication in the past, it also speaks to contemporary forms of cooperation (jerbal ippān doon), sharing (kōjjebar), communal work (rarō; M̗an̗de), and collective celebrations (keemem), practices that speak to, but do not exhaust, consensus-based self-representation of a culturally meaningful way of life in the Marshall Islands (Berman 2019; Carucci 1997b; Loeak et al. 2004; Rudiak-Gould 2013: 21–22).
The flipside of this is the notion that urban dwelling is weakly connected, perhaps even antithetical, to a culturally meaningful life (see also Berman 2020; Rudiak-Gould 2013). “Everything costs money in Mājro” is the mirror mantra. In this portrayal, social life is characterized by selfishness (n̄a wōt, only me/me alone) and disunity (ejjel̗o̗k joun wōt, no unity; bwilo̗k, fracture), the latter gaining an extra dimension by the potential disruption that follows the steady stream of rural to urban migration that haunts rural atolls. Forced to buy their food in the stores, people do not share what they have or help each other in subsistence practices. They are instead wasting time, a phrase used in English to address a particular form of urban idleness resulting from a lack of meaningful activities to pursue. Collective celebrations exhaust household budgets and people expect cash payment for communal work. Money (m̗ani; jāān) mediates social relations, making life in town a life of money dependency, as captured in the phrase wāween mour in m̗ani (life according to money).
These mirror narratives provide a necessary context to begin unpacking the phrase “we don’t need money on Epoon.” The backdrop is an acute awareness of shifting social relationships tied to an ever-increasing influence of the money economy. In their dystopic depiction, my research participants viewed this as the cause of disrupted families, dissolving values, and fracturing social life, all of which feed a threatening narrative of cultural loss. Much more than reflecting an ideal of subsistence-based self-reliance, it is a phrase about culture’s relationship to autonomy, as it often served to refuse notions of social disintegration tied to increasing money dependency. It is a phrase consciously uttered to reject or oppose cultural loss and emerging market relations.
The perception that culture—summed up in specific lifeforms, ideas, practices, and values—presents a kind of antidote to emerging market relations—with its perceived dislocation, disintegration, and dependency—holds relevance far beyond Epoon. Indeed, I frequently heard mirrored statements with similar meaning in Mājro, as people claimed that “they don’t need money on rural atolls.” This statement was often followed by a variation of a twin sentiment, proclaiming, in English, that “that’s where the true Marshallese culture is.” Taken to its ultimate abstraction, the phrase “we don’t need money on Epoon” is a statement about the dialectics of culture and money in the Marshall Islands, which I will spend the rest of this book unpacking.
There is a tension running through local discussions of money dependence in the Marshall Islands, one in which culture is separated from, yet dependent on the market economy. At the heart of this tension is what E. P. Thompson (1961a: 33) has called “the dialectical interaction between culture and something that is not culture.” That is, framing something as cultural means that one is simultaneously framing something else under another category, for example money (or m̗ani) or religion to separate them into two or more different realms. Such separations of culture and not-culture take many forms in the Marshall Islands. This book concentrates on the relationship between culture and money, but other books could easily concentrate on the separation between culture and religion, for example. No matter their form, such separations are ambiguous, shifting, and context dependent.
As Thompson (1961a: 33) argued, the act of distinguishing something as culture vis-à-vis something else deemed not-culture is an active process through which people are making their history. It is, moreover, an act of meaning-making, since defining something as culture in relation to something deemed something else is often the same as defining it as meaningful. This is what allows innovations and adaptations an entry into the cultural realm and what forces outdated and unwanted relics out. Understood in this way, culture is a pressing issue in the contemporary Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), a relatively new nation state where the national identity is interchangeable with an idea of a shared culture and a shared history (at the exclusion of most foreign residents, whether naturalized citizens or labor migrants). The idea of culture is very much part of the public discussion of what the nation state is meant to entail and where it is heading (see Chapter 5).
When Marshall Islanders talk about “the Marshallese way” (m̗antin M̗ajel̗)—a way of life steeped in sharing, kindness, and cooperation—they generally define it in opposition to a Western Other steeped in market relations whose social life is mediated by money. This is a commonplace throughout Oceania (Martin 2013; Perminow 2003; Presterudstuen 2019; Rasmussen 2015). The relatively recent introduction of general purpose money (Bohannan 1959) to the region, especially to parts of Melanesia (Akin and Robbins 1999), means that anthropologists have been in a position to document its adoption and incorporation into everyday life and the accompanying attempts to square this with culturally appropriate ways of being and living (Gregory [1982] 2015; Strathern 1975). But even in those cases where the monetary economy has been in place for more than 150 years, like Epoon, money has remained ambiguously placed between the market sphere and the local moral economy (Akin 1999; Knauft 2016; LiPuma 1999; Mosko 1999; Presterudstuen 2016; Rasmussen 2015).
That culture is separated from money, and, by extension, the market economy means that Marshall Islanders tend to view certain acts of moneymaking, for example the buying and selling of goods, as a purely economic endeavor and therefore something other than culture. This does not mean that money has no place in cultural activities. Indeed, money has featured explicitly in a range of important rituals for decades. Money takes centerstage as donations and gifts at birthday parties, communal celebrations, and funerals (Hess 2004); as key components in the piñata-like exploding money tree used in Christmas celebrations (Carucci 1997b: 27); and, on Epoon at least, as personal adornments (for example as leis) in large church events. In all these occasions, money mediate social relationships in a positive way, showing that money is both personal and impersonal (Hart 2007).
Yet, this side of money is typically under-communicated in local discussions of culture. Instead, money, moneymaking, and their related notion of money dependency, are explicitly framed as the antithesis of culture (see also Rudiak-Gould 2013: 25; Schwartz 2021: 156). That is, Marshall Islanders tend to place money in a root-of-all-evil narrative where it is thought to encourage moral corruption. From this viewpoint, the major issue with money is that it challenges subsistence living by pushing people away from a reliance on locally grown or caught foods, a form of self-sufficient sustenance seen to maintain communal togetherness by encouraging interhousehold cooperation and a shared exploitation of local resources (see Chapter 3).
It is important to stress that these are ideal representations and that ideal representations are models for and not models of real-life experiences. Moreover, people often relate to ideal values in surprising ways. Elise Berman (2020), for example, has expanded our understanding of ideals of sharing and generosity (jouj) by showing how people frequently help each other to avoid sharing, thereby bringing ethnographic nuance to ideal representations of cultural values. But we also need to investigate what such ideal representations aim to do and what sort of social situation they address.
In a cultural imaginary where the good life is constituted by self-sufficient subsistence living, money is incompatible with culture. This means that, in some contexts, the market economy, or rather what the market economy represents, is perceived as a direct threat to cultural preservation because it lures people into livelihoods and social relationships that do not match cultural ideals. Yet, the preservation of culture is also perceived as dependent upon the market economy, particularly when that entails culturally valued labor forms, though that is typically a point people make more tacitly.
This is especially the case in that section of the economy that revolves around the commoditization of material culture. That is, products created or caught through the exploitation of natural resources. Together, these create a set of niche industries that dominate what is commonly dubbed, in English, “the local economy,” a shorthand I adopt here to address economic endeavors with and valuation of material culture. Engaging in this section of the market economy typically means buying or selling culturally meaningful things (objects, products, materials), things that appeal to widespread notions of culture, such as craft, copra, raw or processed fish and other foods, and various remedies. The making and selling of such cultural goods are forms of economic activity most associated with so-called rural atolls, where “the Marshallese way” is commonly perceived to be most vigorous.
Therefore, participation in the local economy is framed as an important means for cultural preservation. This is because giving people the opportunity to sell their yields also means having an incentive to keep the cultural knowledge and practice behind the products alive. That could mean maintaining and developing the art of weaving, cultivating and consuming local food (m̗ōn̄ā in M̗ajel̗), or sustaining a deep-felt connection to the ocean through a range of fishing methods. What is crucial here is that the economic side (the selling) of the manufacture of cultural goods is not understood as culturally meaningful in itself but as a means for cultural preservation.
People also talk about the trading of material culture as a means to secure economic survival. This is a critical point for understanding how subsistence living and the local economy provide an antidote for dependency. Trading in material culture does not have any real impact on economic dependency at the state level. However, it produces a sense of self-reliance at the household level because it allows people to sustain a lifeform based largely on subsistence living and petty trade, with only a limited influence of money. This is a lifeform that is seen as more cultural, more in tune with conceptualizations of m̗anit and m̗antin M̗ajeļ, than, say, working in the service or construction industries in Mājro. In other words, cultural preservation is seen as fundamentally dependent on one’s mode of livelihood.
By preserving or holding on to culture, whether that means maintaining a way of life deemed cultural in a general sense (subsistence living on a rural atoll) or holding on to some meaningful cultural trait or skill in town (such as fishing or weaving), one is simultaneously keeping open the possibility for economic survival. Likewise, by engaging in the local economy, one is not merely making a living but also maintaining an intimate connection to some aspects of culture that are definable and consciously articulated.
Yet, it is important to stress that most definitions of culture are contested and that my research participants tended to define culture differently in different contexts, depending on the point the speaker was trying to make. This is where the frictions between culture and not-culture become important. Grappling with culture’s relation to the money, for example, is a way to refuse the emerging market relations rising from an increasing money dependency by framing their economic activities as culturally meaningful and therefore morally good. Such contestations over culture, what it entails and where it should lead, provide a multilayered perspective on how people construct a concept of the morally good, a construction that shifts according to the dialogic context and discursive aim.
Therefore, when Marshall Islanders define certain phenomena, practices, and objects as culturally meaningful, they are not only making a statement about what culture is (and is not). They are also, in a more tacit way, saying something about what culture, understood as separate from but entangled with the market economy, does. What culture does in relation to questions of self-reliance and autonomy is to help in the pursuit of a meaningful life by constructing a sense of perseverance when faced with potentially disrupting changes wrought by such things as state dependence and an increased influence of the monetary economy at the grassroots level. That is, the idea of culture becomes a framework for thinking about and a practical guide for dealing with contemporary social issues tied to migration, health, and economic hardship. By doing culture, including production for the market, one secures a meaningful existence and experiences nearness to both people and land.
This concern is essentially Polanyian in the sense that it could be read as a worry over the extent to which economic pursuits, like the buying and selling of craftwork, are embedded in social relations (Polanyi [1944] 2001: 60). Contestations over whether craft is culture or commerce, for example (see Chapter 6), are not concerned with commodity exchange in itself, since that has always been part of social life in the Marshall Islands, but with the extent its “structural consequences [are] able to influence the total outer and inner life of society,” as Georg Lukács (1967: 66) has put it. What is at stake is not a complete refusal of everything economical, but an assertion of control over one’s economic relations—a “double movement” safeguarding an economy embedded in social relations (Polanyi 2001: 136). Dealing in material culture is crucial because it provides an opportunity for people to engage in moneymaking on their own terms while also fueling the idea that they are preserving culture. By taking the manufacture and sale of material culture as an ethnographic vantage point, this book will analyze what sort of conceptual work the separation of m̗anit and m̗ani, culture and money, does for Marshall Islanders in their quest for a meaningful life.
Table 0.1. A model of the dialectical relationships permeating my analysis, illustrating how they connect with the central analytical distinction between the culture sphere and the money sphere.Culture sphere
Money sphere
M̗anit
M̗ani
Ippān doon
N̄a wōt
Mour in M̗ajel̗
Mour in kōm̗m̗an jāān
Rural
Urban
Cooperative work
Wage labor
Togetherness
Alienation
Embedded
Disembedded
Mutuality
Market
Use value
Exchange value
Gifts
Commodities
The dialectical relationship between culture and money that this book explores relates to what Stephen Gudeman (2008) has called economy’s tension. Here, two distinct value domains, characterized by the logic of mutuality and the logic of market, interact dialectically, often coming into conflict and mutual resistance (Gudeman 2008: 4). This classification recalls Karl Polanyi’s (2001; 2018a: 267) distinction between an economy embedded in personal human relationships and a dislocated market economy in which human relationships become impersonal, disembedded from meaningful social relationships.
What I call culture and what Gudeman calls mutuality is to the embedded economy what the market economy is to a disembedded one. This form of mutuality becomes visible in culturally valued labor practices based on cooperative work, work that produces objects that people tend to think about in terms of their use value rather than exchange value, also when they are made for and sold at the market (Table 0.1).
What distinguishes Polanyi’s perspective from Gudeman’s is that Polanyi was concerned with the historical shift from one kind of economy to another, while Gudeman’s concern has been with the theoretical understanding of contemporary economies. The second difference lies in their analytical methods. While Polanyi never claimed that any economy was fully disembedded—he, indeed, thought that impossible (Block 2001: xxiv)—his separation remained dichotomous rather than dialectical, as it was for Gudeman (2008: 95). That is, Polanyi’s model of economy gives the impression of two separated realms for economic behavior, although his notion of the double movement provides a more complex image (Polanyi 2001: 136). Gudeman, on the other hand, framed the interaction between the two realms as central to his understanding of economy’s tension (see also Gregory 2009b).
My concern in this book builds from local worries aligned with both Polanyi and Gudeman’s academic interests. Like Polanyi, my research participants were grappling with how to understand the transformations of social and economic relations as set in motion by increased money dependence and creeping economic disembeddedness. Like Gudeman, I see these transformations as an outcome of a dialectical relationship between two distinct value systems with distinct forms of logic. What sets my concern more clearly apart from theirs is that they were primarily interested in developing theories of economy whereas I am most interested in building a theory of what kind of work the idea of culture does to help people grapple with and make sense of growing inequality and emerging market relations.
That is, I will show how culture becomes a framework for meaning-making that stimulates social action. I will analyze how Marshall Islanders use notions of togetherness (ippān doon), tradition (m̗anit in etto), and custom (m̗anit in M̗ajeļ)—all of which feeds a more general idea of culture epitomized as the true Marshallese way (lukkuun mour in M̗ajel̗)—to grapple with contemporary patterns of social inequality. The dialectical relation between culture and money is crucial in this respect because it inspires conscious articulations of culture that help people to resist the “total influence” of the market logic.
The question of emerging market relations is a central analytical topic rising from the ethnographic context I deal with in this book. Early critics of capitalism and political economy often conceptualized the rise of capitalism as contingent upon a separation between an economic sphere and the wider society or culture. This is a separation that distinguished the capitalist economy from the natural economy and that saw the latter not only as a precursor to but as a stronghold against capitalism (Luxemburg [1913] 1951: 368–69; Marx [1858] 1973: 489–90). As Murray Bookchin noted in an interview with reference to The Great Transformation, capitalism did not grow naturally. Instead, “People were dragged into capitalism screaming, shouting, and fighting all along the way, trying to resist this industrial and commercial world” (Bookchin 2013). This concerns the issue of commodity production, but it also concerns the wider organization of labor and the economic mode of production.
Many theorists linked the rise of capitalism to the separation of economic relations from other forms of relational obligation, thereby creating (an idea of) an economic sphere separable from the wider sociocultural context (Marx [1858] 1973: 511–12; Polanyi 2001; 2018a; Sayer 1991: 139). Karl Marx ([1857] 1973: 363), for example, saw the existence of capital and wage labor as resting on the separation of labor from its objective moments of existence, meaning the separation of labor from the laborer by means of objectification of labor power. At the heart of the separation between economy and society is an increased labor alienation—in which labor is separated from the individual in such a degree as to replace social relations embedded in “wider networks of relational obligation” (Martin 2018b: 89)—and the rational pursuit of economic value at the expense of other forms of value.
Marx and other early critics of capitalism drew a distinction between production happening within the domestic sphere according to the logic of mutuality and an alienated form of capitalist production. They tended to view craft manufacture as the antithesis of capitalist production due to what they perceived as unalienated forms of labor with a strong attachment to the household. This was perceived as work appealing to human nature and that therefore maintained the worker’s sense of wellbeing, self-fulfillment, and the development of physical and mental energies (Greenhalgh 1997: 33).
William Morris, whose mantra was “art made by the people and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user” (1882: 64), praised craft for placing control of the means of production within the consumptive community itself (Morris [1888] 2008: 17). Because most forms of craftwork took place along household chores, it could be construed as a form of unalienated labor even when it was consciously directed at market sales. This is one reason why the household so often stands in opposition to the imagined institutions of modern capitalism (e.g., the factory), a role that has provided an analytical entry point for scholars concerned with understanding capitalism and modernity (see Chapter 3).
A key concern circles the question of when engaging in market exchange moves from being an opportunity to becoming a compulsion (Li 2014: 6; Wood 2002: 7). Polanyi (2001: 56), for example, stressed the possibility of selling potential surplus of otherwise subsistence products without compromising the self-reliance of the household. As Tania Murray Li (2014: 7) has argued from the vantage point of Sulawesi, production for the market is not in itself a sign of capitalist relations so long as the producers maintain control over the means of production. This is important in the Marshall Islands context where market sale was based on commodities made from evenly distributed natural resources, manufactured or harvested through mutual aid in interhousehold cooperation.
Not only were the things circulating within the local economy materially and aesthetically indistinguishable from each other whether they were made for the market, ritual purposes, or immediate consumption (use), but the labor organization was too. Labor and its exploits followed what Polanyi would have distinguished as nonmarket modes of economic behavior (see Gregory 2009b: 134–39), comprised by a mishmash of redistribution, reciprocity, and householding. Labor was therefore a key reason why people could engage in market sales without simultaneously experiencing that it threatens m̗anit or imposes alienation. It allowed them to engage in moneymaking without disrupting the social fabric, exemplifying what Polanyi (2001: 136) called a countermovement to the expanding market.
“We don’t need money on Epoon” is therefore a statement that could be read as “Our social relations are not embedded in the self-regulating market here on Epoon.” The point is that labor and the general modes of economic behavior are still capable of being described as instituted in accordance with nonmarket principles. Even when moneymaking was the explicit goal, as it sometimes was with craft and other forms of petty commodity production, labor was organized in ways indistinguishable from subsistence work. This stands in contrast to the idea that production for the market fundamentally alters the character of the household as a unit of production. Instead, market production and household production for other than market purposes are capable of being described as existing in harmony, at least in some contexts.
A key reason is that work is governed by moral obligations of mutual aid (reciprocity), most often in the form of interhousehold cooperation (householding). The rewards reaped from this were usually presented to and redistributed by a household head (al̗ap), chief (irooj/lerooj), politician, or pastor. Moreover, the manufactured goods were only potentially commodities, as things made for personal consumption or ritual prestation could be repurposed toward market sales, just as things made for market sale could be repurposed to meet ritual or personal needs. In other words, moneymaking on rural atolls did not reflect market relations in the form of alienated labor but remained embedded in social networks of relational obligation in ways that are compatible with common conceptions of culture.
It is important to stress, as Polanyi himself did, that the shift from an embedded to a disembedded economy is never complete. The market is never fully self-regulating and the double separation of labor from persons, on the one hand, and persons from social networks, on the other, remains “largely rhetorical” and “always incomplete and potentially partially reversible” (Martin 2018b: 89). This is so, Polanyi contended, because the increased influence of the market constitutes a double movement in which the spread of free trade capitalism is met with resistance in the form of protective countermovements (Polanyi 2001: 136). The aim of such countermovements is to restrict the rise of fictitious commodities—labor, land, and money—things originally created for other purposes than market sales (Polanyi 2001: 76), thereby counteracting the reorganization of society under market principles.
This resistance has a moral dimension, as Marshall Islanders point to when they stress the separation between m̗anit and m̗ani to contrast life on rural atolls with life in town. It is in constructing such contrasts that the ideals of self-reliance, mutuality, and togetherness that permeate local constructions of culture come most clearly into view. Culture becomes a trope through which people can describe acts of moneymaking as socially meaningful, linking them to valued forms of interdependence within face-to-face communities to safeguard an economy embedded in social relationships. The local economy provided an opportunity for people to engage in moneymaking on their own terms while also fueling the idea that they were preserving culture. Meanwhile, by commodifying culture, they turned it into a resource that secured a meaningful livelihood.
“Culture is a fighting word in Micronesia,” the Marshallese politician Carl Heine (1974: 82) once noted, before observing: “The districts of Micronesia want passionately to preserve their individual cultural identities, but the truth is that they are not at all united on what to do with it.” Heine was writing with reference to what he called the Micronesian political dilemma in a period of increased talks of decolonization and self-governance. Micronesia, understood as the region comprised by the US-administered UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (TTPI), was at a crossroads. The choice was between a path leading toward a complete severance of all ties to the US, a full incorporation into the US, or, as Heine advocated, a third way emphasizing self-governance while keeping its strong ties to the US. This strategy eventually materialized in the Compact of Free Association.
Culture played a part in this dilemma in two important ways. First, it lay at the root of the internal fragmentation that eventually led to the dissolution of the region into four political units, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), the Republic of Palau, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the RMI (Mason 1989). These units largely followed language barriers and notions of shared cultures based on historical integration (except for the FSM). Second, culture was at the heart of the discussion of the political future. Those opting for severance displayed, in Heine’s view, a romanticized and unrealistic return to the past, a harking for a kind of subsistence living that few wanted after a century of entanglements with the market economy. Those opting for full incorporation saw no value in culture preservation, embracing an Americanized lifestyle instead. It was, as Heine saw it, a choice between a coconut and a coke (1974: 83).
Heine’s answer was to look for a way to satisfy both needs, something that maintained respect for the traditional land tenure system while acknowledging that the economic situation could not deal sufficiently with the major social issues of the day. As this book attests to, these issues are still pressing fifty years later in the sovereign nation of RMI. Culture is still at the core of these discussions and that it is still as contested and multifaceted as Heine alluded to in the 1970s. Culture is still a fighting word in the Marshall Islands. Indeed, through discussions of self-reliance and the role of money in contemporary society, Marshall Islanders have made a few things clear about culture worth elaborating.
The first thing Marshall Islanders illustrate about culture is that representations of culture are context dependent (Berliner 2020; Gupta and Ferguson 1992; Spiro 1993). Even if my research participants claimed that there is such a thing as a Marshallese culture consisting of a few specific things, traits, and theories that form a whole that differs from other cultures, they evoked those things, traits, and theories differently in different contexts (see also Bratrud 2021). That is, what is construed as a positive and invigorating cultural reality in one moment could be a source for humiliation or despair in the next, depending on the current discursive aim. For example, during my 2014 fieldwork, ri-Epoon frequently evoked their high degree of subsistence living, stressing their access to local foods and corresponding low degree of money dependency, when contrasting life on Epoon favorably in relation to life in Mājro. However, when the tima, the government fieldtrip ship, failed to arrive in time and the local shops ran out of imported food, people changed their perspective.3
When people needed to dilute their rice with coconut sprouts (iu) and replace their breakfast pancakes with baked breadfruit, the praise for local foods ceased in favor of apologies for not being able to serve or offer their favorite foods. This was a complete reversal of the usual perspective that framed coconut sprouts and baked breadfruit as more desirable alternatives than rice and pancakes. The lack of shop-bought foods made visible an ambivalence tied to food that was normally more secluded.
For example, when discussing good and bad changes over the past few decades with Kweet, a man in his mid-thirties, he mentioned imported food and air transportation as examples of bad changes. He linked imported food to health hazards in the form of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. He further reasoned that air transportation not only made unhealthy stuff more available but made it easier for people to ship healthy local foods to Mājro for sale or gifts instead of eating it themselves. However, he also mentioned imported foods and air transportation among his good changes. While imported foods freed up time previously spent on gathering and cooking local variants, transportation made the imported foods readily available while simultaneously allowing people to make money by selling local products.
To say that Marshall Islanders tend to assign a cultural value to certain objects, marking them as goods that are good, as indeed the local economy relies upon, is only to tell parts of the story. Likewise, to say that Marshall Islanders tend to characterize imported foods in terms of its health hazards and unsociable nature (being less subjected to obligations to share) is also a partial claim (see Berman 2020 for a similar argument about the tensions embedded in the term jouj, generosity). As this example shows, its characterization as either good or bad is context dependent. Kweet’s statements illustrate that imported foods are neither good nor bad in themselves but could be framed in either way depending on the current discursive aim. What is defined in terms of culture in one moment is not necessarily done so in the next. In either case, his statements should be understood as an act of meaning-making that is just as constitutive as reflective of culture.
Another major change in perspectives had to do with notions of time and occurred when the tima failed to arrive as scheduled. Whereas ri-Epoon framed “Marshallese time” (awa in M̗ajel̗) as a positive reflection of the stress-free rural atoll life in the weeks leading up to the anticipated ship’s arrival, they saw it as a symptom of Marshallese incapability, sparking further notions of humiliation, once the delay grew considerable. The tima should not be subject to Marshallese time. In addition to directing the frustration at the government, the ministry in charge of inter-atoll transportation, or the division that organizes the shipping service, this humiliation was directed at “Marshallese people” as a whole. It became an example of why the RMI and the Marshallese people could not manage on their own, but still need help from the outside, that is, the US.
Such shifts in perspectives were common in a range of situations. Someone would tell me that Marshall Islanders and Marshallese culture were much better than Western people and Western culture, a point supported by comparing Marshallese and US murder rates, for example. Later, that same person could tell me that they need speed bumps on the Mājro road because Marshallese people are crazy and unreliable, a reason also given for why Marshall Islanders should not drink alcohol or smoke tobacco.
Similarly, a person could stress elaborate food sharing as a virtue in one context, only to bemoan a perceived Marshallese incapacity to save and plan for the future in another, framing elaborate food sharing as a form of squander. Occasionally, such negative representations went beyond the discursive realm to have an effect as an acute sense of shame vis-à-vis foreigners. For example, in 2014, no families on Epoon were willing to host a volunteer teacher through the WorldTeach program on account of an embarrassment over the lack of toilet facilities.
Whether large or small, these notions of humility or inferiority often served to exemplify why the RMI could not manage on its own. Kanpil echoed Kweet’s ambivalence toward air transportation and imported foods when claiming that the plane brings everything that is good but also everything that is bad. He elaborated his point by explaining that the good thing becomes bad because Marshall Islanders do not know how to manage them. His example was imported foods (particularly rice, sugar, and flour), which, he claimed, turned from something good to something bad because misuse and lacking medical knowledge led to epidemic levels of noncommunicable diseases (see Ichiho et al. 2013).
More important, this elaboration led him, as it so often did others, into a deeper discussion of Marshallese incapability. It served as a springboard to the kind of claims mentioned above, like the need for speed bumps and self-discipline. In this case, it led Kanpil to evoke the recent failed attempt at a vote of no confidence against then-president Christopher Loeak. It had been a messy affair, with (completely false) rumors circulating on Epoon about a terrorist having made his way to Mājro to become a kind of ambassador for the president. To Kanpil, it signaled that the RMI was too young a nation with too little experience and knowledge of how to effectively be a part of the global society of nations.
These dynamics seem to echo a localized version of the kind of humiliation that Marshall Sahlins (1992: 23–24) saw as a necessary step toward so-called modernization. This is a notion that leads people to “despise what they are, to hold their own existence in contempt—and want, then, to be someone else” (1992: 24). Joel Robbins (2004: 10) has elaborated this idea in his model of cultural change in which “people take on an entirely new culture on its own terms.” For these authors, the notion of humiliation becomes all-encompassing to the point that people abandon their own culture.
However, as I have shown here, representations of humiliation are just as context dependent as positive representations of culture. It is the shifts in perspective that are ethnographically interesting and the over-emphasis on humiliation runs a risk of neglecting the other side of the coin in which those same factors that led to a narrative of humiliation are reframed in narratives of cultural pride. Culture, then, or rather representations of culture, are context dependent.
The second thing my Marshallese research participants make clear is that culture is contested. It is safe to say that most people on Epoon agreed that, in Robbins’s (2004, 27) terms, Marshallese culture is a Christian culture (though Muslims and followers of Bahá’í in Mājro would likely object). However, they did not agree on a definition of either term across denominational lines.
Among Epoon Protestants of the United Church of Christ (UCC), who are the theological heirs of the first missionaries in the Marshall Islands, it is the prevailing view that the atoll should have no other religion but theirs: juon wōt, only one. They also doubted whether one could cast their Pentecostal and Mormon counterparts as Christian at all. While they largely accepted the Pentecostal BNJ (Bukot nan Jesus [Pukot n̄an Jesus], Searching for Jesus) as Christians, they also undermined their credibility by claiming that they believed more in their pastor than in Jesus. Very few accepted the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint (Mormons) as Christians on account of them “having two Bibles” and “worshiping Joseph Smith as a god.” “Our god is from the Middle East, their god is from America,” one UCC deacon asserted.
The Pentecostals and Mormons, on their side, have had their reasons for breaking with the UCC faith, and they likewise charge the Protestants for failing to practice what they preach. Mormons pointed out that they met with more hostility than hospitality, a charge that questions the Protestants’ dedication to m̗anit. Moreover, non-Protestants of all stripes noted that the Protestant conception of what is meant to be Christian, which centers on a personal promise of devotion to God, allowed their younger affiliates to sleep around, smoke, and drink alcohol without ecclesiastical consequences because one does not typically become Christian until long into adulthood.
Figure 0.1. Women from all denominations during Liberation Day celebrations on Epoon in 2014. The women went door to door to sing for the few surviving men who had lived under World War II, ending at Rupe where they sang for the Protestant pastor © Ola Gunhildrud Berta.
More important than differing conceptions of what it means to be a Christian is the differing ways people from the three major denominations on Epoon in 2014 defined culture in relation to their church affiliation. Members of the UCC largely conflate religion and culture, and I never heard anyone make a conceptual separation between the two with regards to the present.4 Thus, UCC deacons could claim, in English, that “everything on this atoll is rooted in theology,” meaning that such things as place names, local legends, atoll regulations, and, indeed, the origin of the atoll itself could be traced to Christian doctrine or at least the era of early missionizing (Berta 2024).
They also held that the relatively recent religious diversity on the atoll represented a fracturing of the community (see also Carucci 2003). They exemplified this by pointing to a perceived decline in community-wide cooperation. This perceived decline, I eventually learned, was especially directed at projects related to the Protestant church, such as refurnishing, cleaning the outside area, husking coconuts from its grounds, or participating in a fortnightly food tribute to its pastor, whom many deem more significant than the chief (Berta 2019). These things are all important parts of the UCC definition of culture and something they (say that they) expect people of other denominations to adhere as well.
Contrary to the Protestants, both members of the BNJ and Mormons separated culture and religion conceptually, albeit in different ways. While the Mormons represented a radical break with tradition—with its young missionary leaders, its pious abstention from caffeine, youth baptism, and their Book of Mormon—its members also adhered to many customary obligations abandoned by other churches. Even the Protestants acknowledged that Mormons often contributed to fundraisers, food tributes, and certain events at the church that could be framed as secular, such as a birthday celebration for the pastor and gatherings for Liberation Day. As one Mormon woman told me regarding food tributes to the UCC pastor, “My grandmother brought food to the Protestant reverend, so I do it too. That’s custom [m̗anit], not religion” (Berta 2019: 244).
In other words, Mormon support for and participation in food tributes, an activity that from the UCC perspective feeds into the conflation of religion and m̗anit, depends on a separation of religion and m̗anit from the Mormon perspective. However, no Mormon ever participated in any refurnishing or cleaning work at any of the Protestant churches during my fieldwork, even if that same grandmother likely participated in such activities, too. For whatever reason, Mormons seemed to have drawn the line for where custom stopped and something else began there. For the BNJ, the opposite was true. While several BNJ affiliates participated in refurnishing one of the Protestants churches, they seldom, if ever, contributed to fundraisers and food tributes.
Protestants frequently lamented the lacking participation from other denominations in all types of UCC-related cooperation projects. They read into this a fracturing community that failed to live up to its customary forms of togetherness. Even so, Protestants themselves did not generally participate in cooperative projects tied to any other churches. However, they did not see that as being out of tune with the general customary obligations to work together because they defined other religious practices outside of the cultural realm, as something that is not culture (Thompson 1961b: 33). What these examples illustrate, then, is that denominational conflict on Epoon is intimately connected to contestations over the place of religion within culture. This was a contestation in which Protestants felt entitled to definitional power, which they asserted by appealing to long-standing historical practices. In stating their case, they were using a language of shared values held within a coherent group.
However, the language of a coherent culture based on a shared set of values is itself exclusionary when viewed from another perspective because it is an act of boundary construction. This entails a notion of culture that reifies cultural boundaries to serve specific aims. Therefore, in attempting to naturalize their power, Protestants were using their denominational heritage from the first missionaries—that is, their claim to a traditional form of Christianity—to construe a concept of culture along denominational lines (Berta 2024).
There is a crucial power dimension inherent in all representations of culture (see, for example, Bashkow 2004; Bratrud 2021; Clifford 1983; Linnekin 1992). Therefore, the representation of culture as a community based on shared values could be a problematic basis for the construction of anthropological models of culture, as any such representation potentially glosses over internal disagreements. Often, the search for consensus rather than contestations assumes that one perspective has a better grasp than another of what a particular culture is “really like.” Modelling culture in this way, might mean reproducing what I have outlined as the Protestant perspective, which, of course, is itself much more contested than I have let on here, especially along generational lines.
I am not saying, though, that we should renew the call to abandon culture. Culture is a useful concept for anthropologists to work with precisely because different factions argue over cultural boundaries. Since those boundaries necessarily exclude certain perspectives, we need to account for the tensions that arise from competing perspectives. In this book, I am interested in local contestations over the contents and expressions of the culture concept and the work that it does and entails; that is, the social action that it stimulates (see Chapter 5). Culture is an important anthropological concept because it remains a concept through which people construe their worlds (Lentz 2017). This leads to the third thing Marshall Islanders illustrate about culture.
Culture remains a potent analytical concept for ethnographic inquiries of meaning-making. Representations of culture provide a window into those things that engage, excite, and worry people precisely because of its context dependent and contested nature. When seen over the course of time, culture is not unequivocally framed as good or bad but is instead wrought with tensions. This calls for a methodology that takes seriously people’s own construction of culture to better understand what is at stake in the moment—the current discursive aim—while simultaneously refusing to accept those representations as the ultimate truth about what a culture is “really like” (Astuti 2017; Berta 2024; Thomas 1989). In this case, that means beginning from the separation between m̗anit and m̗ani and their related terms and concepts to explore how Marshall Islanders construct two separate spheres that I distinguish analytically as culture and money.
The central tension in this book shows itself in the dialectical relationship between these spheres. Culture and money are seen as separate or even antithetical realms at the same time as they are seen as mutually constitutive in the sense that the existence of the one makes possible the existence of the other. There is a potential paradox here, as it seems that culture must be commodified to avoid commodified culture. The aim of this book is to show that most people manage to live with this paradox for most of the time, but that it comes to the surface to create tension in certain situations and when grappling with the conceptualization of certain objects.
The crucial way in which the commoditization of culture is seen to ensure its preservation is that it makes possible a kind of lifestyle, or lifeform, tightly associated with self-reliance and a labor organization that is embedded in (positively construed) social relations. It is, in other words, associated with culture. Similarly, without the prevailing idea that certain goods are cultural, without their perceived cultural content, rural atoll dwellers would not have a marketable force behind their petty commodity production. It is, then, the separation of culture and market that makes possible the preservation of both.
What I call the local economy in this book consists of a series of commodities and economic activities based upon material culture and perceived traditional practices (invented or not; genuine or spurious) to make or extract culturally valued things. The things made and the knowledge and practices utilized to make them are commonly understood to have a cultural importance that transcends geographical, generational, gendered, and hierarchical boundaries. The local economy is therefore an “economy of culture,” to borrow a concept from Alanna Cant (2019). Based on her work in Oaxaca, Mexico, she has identified three such economies of culture: cultural tourism, the local market for handicraft (artesanías), and the international market for ethnic art.
In general, Cant’s concept concerns the market for objects and practices widely understood to embody cultural content, meaning that the things marketed and sold represent cultural practices, performances, and knowledge (Cant 2019: 9). The term captures a sense of cultural belonging that sometimes leads to ideas of ownership that hinges on the entification of culture (Ernst 1999). In this form, the culture concept “repackage[s] the diffuse practices of everyday life into commodified objects, places, and events” (Cant 2019: 8). That is, culture becomes accessible in specific material manifestations, embodied in a set of objects that are owned by specific people and given away or sold at the market.
In the Marshall Islands, this means that the objects circulating within this realm evoke familiar and highly valued forms of cooperative work and labor relations that are mostly associated with rural atolls. They also recall traditional forms of gendered knowledge and serve as vehicles for knowledge transmission. In a more general sense, these objects of material culture are concrete material manifestations of abstract cultural values tied to notions of subsistence living, interdependence, and togetherness. Therefore, Marshall Islanders typically understand the things circulating within the local economy as having cultural significance. Like their Oaxacan counterparts, they are “profoundly affected by the idea of culture and their place within it” (Cant 2019: 9). More importantly, the conscious articulation of the relationship between commodified objects and culture is itself a key mechanism in the production of culture.
There are two key distinctions between the local economy as I describe it here and any of the economies of culture that Cant analyzes from Oaxaca. The first is that the products made and circulated within the local economy in the Marshall Islands are made, used, and purchased by—as well as marketed toward—Marshall Islanders. That is, Marshall Islanders are manufacturers, consumers, and customers, and the nature of the goods made are not predetermined for either personal consumption or market sales but used in a way that meets the most immediate needs. I will elaborate the historical background for this peculiarity in Chapter 2.
The second distinction is that I do not understand the local economy as a pure market economy in the sense that the products sold embody multiple forms of value. Their valuation is not merely an outcome of labor or supply and demand mechanisms, but embodies use, exchange, and sentimental value at the same time. That is, their place at the market is ambiguous because it presents a concrete case of the tension-filled interaction between culture and market. A key reason is that, even when made for the market, their manufacture draws on culturally valued labor relations based on interhousehold cooperation (Chapter 3).
The products made circulate as gifts, commodities, and ritual presentations—depending on current need—through both market and nonmarket exchanges. The same individual can use a similar object to meet different means; for example, by selling one item to a local craft shop and using the other as a ceremonial gift to her pastor. As I will show in Chapter 6, the craft items that flourish today would not do so if not for the existence of the market. Therefore, people understand the market economy and wage labor not merely as instruments for modernity but as key ingredients in ongoing projects of culture preservation (see Chapter 4). By participating in the local economy, then, rural and urban Marshall Islanders engage in powerful displays of cultural vitality that become important in their continuous strive to create and maintain a sense of self-reliance and cultural autonomy.
The local economy comprises a variety of caught, harvested, and manufactured things extracted from common pools of natural resources, most of which are highly valued objects of material culture. Many of these things have a gendered dimension to them. I will critically examine the notion of gendered divisions of labor in Chapter 3, but it is worth giving a surface-level presentation of the general patterns here.
For women, amim̗ōn̗o is by far the most important industry in the local economy. The word amim̗ōn̗o comes from the Japanese word for knitting (though no knitting is involved) and is a catch-all phrase used for all kinds of plaited craftwork, often referred to as “women’s handicraft.” While most amim̗ōn̗o is plaited and embroidered, the practice of making craft is called weaving and its makers are called weavers. The amim̗ōn̗o industry also includes smaller pieces of wood carving (typically made by men) and raw materials for weaving such as coconut fronds and midribs and pandanus leaves. Women also make a variety of food, drinks, and various remedies, including medicine, beauty products, and body oils.
Men’s engagement in the local economy differs between rural and urban atolls in terms of moneymaking. For urbanites, small-scale fishing is the most important industry. This is because fish markets only exist in urban areas. Fishers living on a few atolls in the vicinity of Mājro can also access these markets but, except for certain places on Arn̗o (Arno), can only do so intermittently. Fish is a central product of culture on rural atolls as well, but for subsistence purposes and not moneymaking. Instead, they make money by making copra (dried coconut flesh). Copra is truly a global commodity, but people nevertheless construe it as a product that holds cultural content.
Even if the copra palm is a cash crop, coconuts have always been instrumental for survival in an atoll environment and are central in the mythological universe. Moreover, the labor relations that go into copra work are like those put into subsistence living and community projects (Chapter 3). That is, it entails a form of labor that people talk about as being part of m̗anit. Moreover, since the inception of a permanent coconut trade in the Marshall Islands in the 1860s, copra has been crucial for economic survival and has, in that capacity, become a key aspect of male identity on rural atolls. Therefore, copra is meaningfully conceptualized as a product of material culture, even if it is more explicitly valued for its monetary contributions to the household economy than amim̗ōn̗o is.
Except for copra, all products of the local economy are used and exchanged in both daily and ritual life, and many of them are commonly held as cultural symbols used in both positive and negative terms. For instance, a statement like “there is no breadfruit left here in Mājro” symbolizes cultural loss. Likewise, the statement “life is good here because we eat and share breadfruit” symbolizes cultural vitality. The crucial aspect of these objects is their ability to circulate both as cultural and as commercial. This in turn means that they are transitional objects that both separate and conflate culture and market. People need to designate them as cultural to achieve this quality, but only in a way that allows them to be commodified without posing a threat to culture in a more general sense.
The cultural commoditization at the heart of the local economy is therefore different from what, with reference to Indonesia’s craft economy, Lorraine Aragon (2011: 65) calls the split economy, even if her conception, too, identifies a separation between culture and economy. In Aragon’s terms, the split economy addresses a split between an internal and an external market. In the internal market, local production processes serve “an internal ritual or embedded social purpose,” whereas the external market entails “monetary payments from ‘outsiders’.” The goods and ceremonies made and performed are similar in both markets but become “reprised as tourist souvenirs and entertainment” in the external market.
Aragon stresses how “a single idiom of production” creates both communal and commercial values, but that these values are interpreted differently for different audiences. Moreover, she observes that the commercial end of the spilt economies can itself be divided between an internal and external market, meaning that “creations are produced differentially for varied sets of paying audiences or consumers.” The result is a cheapening effect on goods made for the domestic market because the high-quality products are reserved for high-end customers and tourists.
Unlike Aragon’s Indonesian case, it is not analytically fruitful to distinguish between internal and external markets in the Marshall Islands. While it is true that Marshall Islanders and what few tourists exist interpret the objects sold differently, they are not made under different conditions to serve different needs. The same item could be made to serve an “embedded social purpose” or to secure monetary payments. Depending on the social situation, a given piece of amim̗ōn̗o could function as a gift, commodity, tribute, or ritual decoration, and one can never be sure what purpose it will serve when making it because circumstances might change to demand a repurposing (Chapter 6). This also means that it is impossible to distinguish between internal and external customers in terms of product quality.
Whereas the split economy entails either goods and performances made and executed to generate different values or a separation between goods made for an internal and external customer, then the goods made within the local economy are materially, ritually, and aesthetically the same no matter which value they pursue or which customer they serve. For the Marshall Islanders I know, the objects of material culture in the local economy can never be unambiguously defined as either “commercial” (commodity) or “cultural” (cultural artefact), though the attempt to do so presents a key issue in this book (Chapter 6).
The conceptual ambiguity embedded in the ideal distinction in anthropological theory between commodity and non-commodity forms is a particular expression of a more general concern about the relationship between culture and money. This is a concern of long-standing theoretical interest within economic anthropology (Appadurai 1988; Cook 2004; Gregory 2015; Thomas 1991), that I will explore ethnographically throughout this book. The question of whether we should understand the economy as separated from the rest of society (or from culture, as I frame it here) is relevant for the conceptualization of the objects traded within the local economy.
In laying out her concept of the economies of culture, Cant provided a perspective that seems to deny the existence of a fully disembedded market economy in the Polanyian sense. Though she never engaged Polanyi’s ideas directly, she explicitly denied that the economy should be understood as “an autonomous space that can be clearly demarcated from the culture and politics that surround it” (2019: 9). Instead, she was concerned with analyzing how market sales of cultural commodities are entangled in a “field of contrasting interpretations of what they are and mean” (2019: 132). The valuation and production of woodcarving in Oaxaca cannot be separated from wider discussions of cultural authenticity, authorship, and labor relations rooted in kinship and neighborhood obligations (Cant 2018).
Cant’s argument about the inseparability of culture and market was directed against Scott Cook (2004), whose concept of commodity cultures is a theoretical affiliate of her economies of culture. Cook’s perspective differs explicitly from Polanyi’s, and his disagreement is directed against Polanyi’s notion of the nonmarket economy embedded in social relationships. In Cook’s understanding, Polanyi downplayed the ways in which the pre-market economy, too, constituted an autonomous space. This is most clearly laid out in relation to commodity circulation, which, Cook argued, should not be subordinated to consumption but seen as part of a quest for value accumulation and productivity expansion also in pre-capitalist societies (2004: 135).
Cook’s argument (2004: 148–49) is that even those products made to satisfy subsistence needs should be understood as “subsistence commodities” embodying exchange values that can be “reckoned objectively in monetized, labor-time terms” in ways that seem to leave Polanyi’s transformation less than great. That is, the adoption of capitalism did not constitute an all-encompassing change in Mesoamerican commodity cultures since their labor organization and subsistence patterns were already steeped in a commodity logic.
Cook therefore followed Arjun Appadurai’s (1986: 13) call to look for “the commodity potential of all things.” He did so by arguing that “it is realistic to assume that every useful artefact is a commodity since the potential exists for it to be exchanged at any time before it is consumed,” and that this can happen also without uniform standards of valuation, being content with a return that is “close enough” (2004: 148). The question about the commodity potential of all things is important for the topic at hand because the manufacture of culturally significant things is one of the crucial fields in which the separation between culture and market comes to the forefront in the Marshall Islands context.
For foreign observers, the commoditization of cultural objects often means stripping them of cultural significance. Such a perspective is common in journalistic accounts, colonial reports, and economic assessments. This is a view that pits commercial goods against cultural artefacts and that sees the work tied to moneymaking as fundamentally different from work that serves social ends. This kind of binary thinking is concerned with questions having to do with commercial versus traditional crafts (Vitarelli 1986; Wavell 2010), economic versus artistic sensibilities (Udui 1964), and, in the wider arts and crafts literature, ethnic arts versus ethno-kitsch (Graburn 1976).
Implicit in these oppositions is the idea that cultural artefacts cannot also be commodities. That is, historical craft were cultural artefacts embodying only a use value that relied upon principles of reciprocity or redistribution if or when they were exchanged (cf. Polanyi 2001: 50–55). Once they were commodified, their exchange value prevailed and they were no longer seen as cultural.
This distinction is not restricted to historical artefacts but has affected the ways in which both Marshall Islanders and foreign commentators think about contemporary products within the local economy. Many of these were introduced or invented in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet they allude to a cultural tradition of (perceived) self-reliance, allowing Marshall Islanders to interpret their manufacture and value realization as socially embedded in the Polanyian sense so that its labor, for example, is organized according to ideals of mutuality (Chapter 3). This is what allows people to construe craftwork and other forms of manufacture (even copra work) as acts of cultural (re)production. The emphasis is on a form of self-reliance that frames commodity sales as a secondary occupation, located outside of the cultural realm.
However, this framing is ambivalent as people struggle with their own conflicting understandings of cultural goods as either cultural or economic; that is, as cultural artefacts or commercial commodities (Chapter 6). The Appadurai/Cook conception therefore creates an impossible theoretical position that construes commodities as both everything and something, both genus and species (Gregory 1997: 46). Such confusion glosses over the ethnographic specificities—the human relations—that make certain objects exchangeable in some contexts but not in others (see also Thomas 1991: 29). In other words, even if people manage to construct sharp distinctions between commercial goods and cultural artefacts, they are distinctions that come in and out of being with different perspectives.
The key ethnographic question to ask, then, is not whether we should understand culture and market as separated from each other in objective terms. Rather, I am asking how and in what situations Marshall Islanders frame culture and money as belonging to separate realms. For the same reason that saying that all things have a commodity potential is trivial and theoretically uninteresting, merely saying all things have the potential to take both commodity and non-commodity form depending on the context of valuation is not in itself theoretically groundbreaking. It is methodologically significant, though, as it reminds us never to lose sight of people’s real-life experiences of grappling with meaning-making.
My primary concern here is with the ways in which my research participants conceptualize their livelihoods in terms of the dialectic between culture and market economy. This is crucial because the everyday grappling with this tension provides an ethnographic entry point to the study of cultural production and because it allows for the possible coexistence of contradictory perspectives. Indeed, a key aim in this book is to ethnographically demonstrate how, despite a concern with separating culture from money, Marshall Islanders manage to construct a perspective that frames the same artefact or class of artefacts as both commodity and non-commodity, or commercial and cultural, at the same time (just like imported food can be both good and bad simultaneously).
One important point about the dialectical approach that I adopt here is that it takes seriously my research participants’ conceptual separation of culture and money while simultaneously refusing to accept this separation as an unchallenged theoretical position. On the one hand, I recognize that the conceptual work needed to construct this distinction serves discursive purposes that are both powerful and significant. It is, for example, important for construing culture as an antidote to despondency and ascriptions of dependence. On the other hand, it is clear from my ethnography that this perspective is only one of several possible and that they all come into play in different contexts to meet different discursive purposes. What people framed as cultural as opposed to money-dependent in one moment, they conceptualized purely as a form of moneymaking in the next. What they framed as a proud cultural tradition in one moment, they cast as a constrictive relic from the past in the next.
There is an analytical tension here that I need to address. This is a tension rising from my analytical gaze and my research participants’ experiences. While it is true that I strive to build my analysis from the ground up, building from the ethnographic material I have documented and collected, it is likely that my emphasis on culture as a conceptual framework for meaning-making is at odds with my research participants. Indeed, most of them are much more prone to emphasize the materiality of culture, to see it as a material relationship that they enact upon the world rather than a way of making sense of it.
This distinction is not lost on me, and it is important to note explicitly here that there is a direct line between the materiality of culture as my research participants experience it and the conceptual framework they construct from it, which is where I put my analytical concentration. As I will elaborate in the book’s conclusion, this is a perspective that begins from an ethnographic vantage point to investigate what culture does instead of the more typical theoretical interest in what culture is. That is, I am concerned with what sort of work the culture concept does for the Marshall Islanders that use it.
Therefore, I am not only concerned with what people say, but the context they say it in and the social action their statements stimulate. That is, when and where they say the things they say, what aims they have in mind when they say it, and how they act upon what they say. This approach helps me to build an ethnographically informed analysis of how these contradictions come into play so as to grasp what Bronislaw Malinowski (1922: 18) called the “imponderabilia of actual life.” This is inaccessible through discursive analysis alone but calls for an analysis that sees (contradictory) statements in relation to practices.
Chapter 1 illustrates the circulation of people, money, and things within a transnational field reaching from rural atolls in the Marshall Islands to Marshallese diaspora communities in the US. I show that the local economy based on material culture is constituted by continuous transactions between these different localities, effectively creating translocal households. Following movements through time and space, the chapter analyzes the basis for economic survival and belonging in the Marshall Islands, while laying bare the methodological foundation on which this book rests. More than an abstract category, the local economy becomes an ethnographic field. This is a field defined not by geographical boundaries, but by the movement of people and their culturally valued goods, things, and ideas within and between different localities.
In Chapter 2, I combine ethnographic and historical data to develop a multi-scalar approach to the analysis of how three colonial legacies in the Marshall Islands: copra, craft, and passports. The chapter traces the historical development of the local economy based on material culture. While culturally important, the local economy contributes little to gross domestic product (GDP). Still, it sustains the household economy on rural atolls and among the urban poor, which in turn helps to provide a sense of (cultural) autonomy. The relative success of the local economy stems largely from the translocality of the Compact era, granting Marshallese passport holders visa-free entry to the US.
Zooming in on concrete practices at the household level, Chapter 3 takes local conceptions of (meaningful) work as a starting point to understand how kinship is experienced and enacted today. Following the circulation of people, objects, and money between rural, urban, and diasporic communities, I show how work becomes important for bringing kinship into being by creating and maintaining ties based on cooperation and mutual aid within and across households. The case of the translocal households shows how monetary transactions help to define and reproduce rather than oppose and dissolve kinship. Mutual aid also provides key scenarios through which the dialectics of culture and money come into play because it can be used as a form of kin work (usually cast as an expression of culture) as well as for moneymaking.
In Chapter 4, I shift the ethnographic focus to Mājro and the bank-affiliated Misco Market, where I did the bulk of my 2018 fieldwork. I illustrate how forms of localized knowledge and skills are construed as a set of Marshallese fundamentals, meaning that they build upon what is perceived as central aspects of a shared culture to build the foundation of a healthy economy. For the people engaged in these efforts, the local economy should not be confined to the household sector but provide a foundation on which to build an economy controlled by Marshall Islanders themselves.
Chapter 5 follows the continuous concern with self-reliance outlined in the previous chapters by turning attention to some of the arenas where culture is commodified and marketed as a source for autonomy. The local economy is important here, because it is built on cultural commodities that ensure monetary income while keeping cultural practices alive. While the conscious marketing of culture could be framed as an obvious setting through which the conceptual distinction between culture and market breaks down, it rather enforces it. This produces a tension between idioms of preservation and creativity, a tension that encourages individuals to shift between different culture concepts in different contexts.
In Chapter 6, I analyze the ambiguous character of handmade crafts (amim̗ōn̗o) by looking at how they are conceptualized, made, used, and circulated within a transnational field. I show that craft holds cultural significance for Marshall Islanders themselves, both as a unifying symbol, mediator of social relationships, and cultural practice. This perspective has been largely overlooked in the Marshall Islands context owing to its initial introduction as a commercial enterprise. Both foreign observers and cultural conservatists often deem craft as inauthentic compared to so-called traditional craft. The ambiguity of craft therefore illuminates the continuous conceptual work of keeping culture and commerce separated. I argue that this work should itself be understood as a process of cultural production, since grappling with tensions and internal contradictions like these allows conscious formulations and reformulations of what culture is (and does) and should be (and do).
The theoretical interventions I make in this book always begin by exploring ethnographically relevant tensions or concerns, whether they are consciously articulated, arising from contradictory statements, or illustrative of a mismatch between ideology and practice. Following such tensions, this book constructs a framework for inquiry that draws on and expands theories of social and economic transformation, the interplay between culture and capitalist production, and dependency to understand contemporary struggles to make sense of emerging market relations.