The Marshallese look: Clothing, culture and identity in a disappearing world

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-312
Author(s):  
C. A. DeCoursey ◽  
Ewa B. Krawczyk

Marshallese youth face extraordinary challenges in creating an identity, due to their economy, isolated location – the Marshall Islands are located in the central Pacific Ocean and comprise of more than 1200 islands and islets – the history of US nuclear testing in the islands and climate change. Contemporary youth identity construction requires constant acts of acculturation, due to media and globalization. This study used content and transitivity analyses to explore how Marshallese youth understand their distinctive look. Content sub-unit frequencies indicated that the Marshallese community was the most significant factor in defining style, particularly cultural uniqueness, history, religion and generational differences. Collective pronouns indicated that acculturation anxieties stemmed from cultural differences and loss and were managed by asserting community affiliation. Personal style preferences reflected contextual and financial limitations. Process-type analysis constructed culture as the most vigorous actor and speaker, where youth roles included perception and cognition, with other islands’ views mediating between the two. Roles attributed to the media and the West included emoting and wanting, where China more closely resembled Marshallese youth, though the ubiquity of western content may render its agency somewhat invisible to Marshallese youth. Overall, Marshallese youth harmonize their individuality within attributed community and contextual factors. This is likely to be their preferred strategy when they emigrate to the United States, a highly individualistic country. Marshallese parents and second-generation Marshallese will require support, in their new context.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-160
Author(s):  
Alexey V. Antoshin ◽  
Dmitry L. Strovsky

The article analyzes the features of Soviet emigration and repatriation in the second half of the 1960s through the early 1970s, when for the first time after a long period of time, and as a result of political agreements between the USSR and the USA, hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews were able to leave the Soviet Union for good and settle in the United States and Israel. Our attention is focused not only on the history of this issue and the overall political situation of that time, but mainly on the peculiarities of this issue coverage by the leading American printed media. The reference to the media as the main empirical source of this study allows not only perceiving the topic of emigration and repatriation in more detail, but also seeing the regularities of the political ‘face’ of the American press of that time. This study enables us to expand the usual framework of knowledge of emigration against the background of its historical and cultural development in the 20th century.


Author(s):  
Andrea Botto Stuven

The Documentation Center of the Contemporary History of Chile (CIDOC), which belongs to the Universidad Finis Terrae (Santiago), has a digital archive that contains the posters and newspapers inserts of the anti-communist campaign against Salvador Allende’s presidential candidacy in 1964. These appeared in the main right-wing newspapers of Santiago, between January and September of 1964. Although the collection of posters in CIDOC is not complete, it is a resource of great value for those who want to research this historical juncture, considering that those elections were by far the most contested and conflicting in the history of Chile during the 20th Century, as it implicted the confrontation between two candidates defending two different conceptions about society, politics, and economics. On the one hand, Salvador Allende, the candidate of the Chilean left; on the other, Eduardo Frei, the candidate of the Christian Democracy, coupled with the traditional parties of the Right. While the technical elements of the programs of both candidates did not differ much from each other, the political campaign became the scenario for an authentic war between the “media” that stood up for one or the other candidate. Frei’s anticommunist campaign had the financial aid of the United States, and these funds were used to gather all possible resources to create a real “terror” in the population at the perspective of the Left coming to power. The Chilean Left labeled this strategy of using fear as the “Terror Campaign.”


Zootaxa ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 590 (1) ◽  
pp. 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
ZOE T. RICHARDS ◽  
CARDEN C. WALLACE

A new coral species, Acropora rongelapensis, from the northern central Pacific Ocean is described. On present records, this species appears to be endemic to the Republic of the Marshall Islands. Distinguishing features of the species include sub-flattened branches with widely separated radial corallites born laterally. Diagnostic characters of the new species place it within the Acropora loripes group.


Author(s):  
Jessica A. Schwartz

The United States conducted sixty-seven nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands from 1946 through 1958. The program was shrouded in secrecy; information about the tests conducted on Marshallese bodies and their land remains classified. This essay considers how Marshallese women from Bikini Atoll and Rongelap Atoll musically sound physical and physiological disruptions and dislocations that expose broader damages caused by the nuclear testing program. Analyzing compositions and performances from a repertoire of Marshallese “radiation songs,” the essay proposes a stylistic framework that works to familiarize listeners with a sonorized logic of radiation which is compiled through recurring motifs of the disabled voice, text setting and silences, and the figure of the question, literal and rhetorical. I stress the political import of these songs as highlighting the failures of biopolitical controls on communities by exposing the production of confined disability at the level of cultural and structural violence.


1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sylvia Lambert ◽  
Stephen Israelstam

The mass media tend to shape the values and opinions of their audience as well as reflect the culture in which they exist. The comics have long been an integral part of the media, appealing to a wide range of age and social class. As such, they could have considerable effect on attitudes and behaviours regarding alcohol consumption. In this paper, we examine the comic strips appearing in the daily newspapers before, during and up to the end of the Prohibition era in the United States, to see how alcohol was portrayed during this period when its manufacture and sale were prohibited.


1941 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 443-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatrice Orent ◽  
Pauline Reinsch

Recently, certain small uninhabited islands in the central Pacific Ocean have assumedsudden importance for the British Empire and the United States. Their value as landing places for commercial aviation and as strategic bases for air and naval forces is being increasingly recognized. Acquired during the past century by Great Britain and the UnitedStates, many of these islands have been the object of conflicting claims to sovereignty by the two nations. To clarify their status, it has been found desirable to review the past practice of these states and to examine those factors which were considered adequateto create sovereign rights over uninhabited islands in the Pacific.


2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Merissa Daborn

From 1946 to 1958 the Marshall Islands was home to extensive US nuclear testing, testing that left behind an extensive health legacy. This paper examines the initial responses to the testing to see how they influenced a legacy that has spanned decades and identifies the indirect and long lasting health consequences and why they appeared. Just as crucial as to why and how these health consequences have affected the Marshallese people, is who has taken responsibility since. Focusing on the 1980s to the 2000s, this paper examines the significance of the responses, or lack thereof, from the United States and how it has contributed to the health legacies of the Marshall Islands. 


2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 111-113
Author(s):  
Anna Piela

This excellent edited collection unpicks and disputes multifarious and intricate processes that underpin the homogenization, otherization, and vilification of immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, Muslim citizens, and individuals with a Muslim cultural background in the group of countries known as “the West.” It does so through presenting a selection of essays that offer an insight into the localized, day-to-day realities of people whose lives are currently defined by their link to Islam. The focus on gender, home, and belonging emphasizes the particular challenge faced by Muslim women: Their bodies are the battleground for the ideological wars fought by western governments on the one hand, and by political Islamists on the other (pp. 30-31). At the same time, media outlets and governmental policies portray and essentialize all Muslims as a single, uniform community defined exclusively by their Muslimness, thereby ignoring any of their differences based on “national origin, rural-urban roots, class, gender, language, lifestyle and degree of religiosity, as well as political and moral conviction” (p. 2). As all of the essays demonstrate, these concerns about representation remain valid, despite the critiques of historical and contemporary orientalism published by Edward Said over thirty years ago notwithstanding: Orientalism (1979) and Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981). The collection is a result of two conferences held in Toronto (2006) and Amsterdam (2008) to discuss these issues. It is organized around four themes: discourse, organizations, and policy; sexuality and family; youth; and space and belonging. The first theme is represented by different perspectives from the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Halleh Ghorashi analyzes the disempowering effects of supposedly “empowering courses” for immigrant women of Muslim backgrounds and indicates how women themselves critique the terms on which such courses are delivered. Fauzia Erfan Ahmed writes about the deteriorating situation for female American Muslim community leaders who are forced into silence despite a long history of female leadership since the time of slavery. Cassandra Balchin’s chapter focuses on Muslim women’s refusal to cede the discourse of their legal rights to both the governments and to patriarchal males within Muslim communities, who are ...


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