A rchive Date
[ 21-02-2005 ]
Category
[ Anthropology ]
sub-Categoy
[ Margaret Mead ]
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[http://www.dahl.com/dahl/rave.asp?raveID=182
Dave's Rave
3/1/00
Way back in 1925, a 23 year old college student named Margaret Mead sailed off to American Samoa, as there were no flights, in that it would be twelve years before Amelia Earhart missed her connection to Honolulu somewhere around Howland Island halfway between here and Australia.
Margaret Mead intended to test theories about the turbulence of adolescence on boys and girls free from contact with the western world and therefore free of the social and moral protocol and proprieties of the west and wrote scholarly treatises, sensational in their time for descriptions of a Polynesian culture in which boys and girls were unshackled by moral convention and were promiscuous in the extreme.
Wrote Mead, “Samoans laugh at stories of romantic love, scoff at fidelity to an absent wife or mistress, and believe explicitly that one love will quickly cure another.”
Last month, The Intercollegiate Studies Institute of Wilmington, Delaware, named Margaret Mead’s best-selling, “Coming of Age in Samoa,” the worst nonfiction book of the past 100 years. These scholars, and others before them, say that Margaret Mead was simply hoaxed by the amused teenagers of the Manu’an Islands, 23 hundred miles south of where we gather today, and fell for every lie they told her.
They say the academic evidence gathered by sociologists who came after her, is that the Samoan youths found her prying personal questions into their sex lives so amusing they fabricated the wildest tales to satisfy her prurient interest and she swallowed them hook, line, and PHD thesis. And so it is that travelers should be reminded that the locals always hold us in contempt and will always try to charge us double the meter.
Even when western landowners turned native Hawaiians into laborers on their own property, resistance to assimilation took the form of a Polynesian ebonics born of Hawaiian’s thrown together with imported migrants from Asia and Portugal and elsewhere on the planatations of pineapple and sugar; each culture sprinkling it’s own linguistic spice and verbal herbals into the etymological stew which simmered into the predominate Hawaiian language spoke in the multi-ethnic back-alleys for more than a century---pidgin.
Even in the marble halls of the statehouse, native Hawaiians will tack on an amendment to a bill to make it mo bettah and flash opponents across the aisle the stink eye. So much so that some academics like University of Hawaii professor Eileen Tamura declare pidgin English should be more properly called Hawaiian Creole English, a distinct and legitimate and bona fide language. A language with words such as “bumbai,” which means, “later, “ as in “Never put off till bumbai, that which you can neglect altogether,” or “hanao-kolele,” which means, “you are very much in trouble, and I’m telling on you.”
But the most inclusive of all-purpose expressions is “da kine.” Because it has its antecedents in all languages. Thingamajig, watchamacallit, whoosiewhatsit, a dual descriptor thingamajig which can be dissected into whoosie, or whatsit. My mother-in-law used a similar construct and referred to things whose name failed to come to mind as, “hickies,” which was presumably the diminutive of “hickeymajigger.”
And leave me not wander too far afield in that I endeavor to fashion these pieces after a female’s bathing suit, long enough to cover the essentials, but brief enough to keep it interesting.
The Hawaiian language may continue to keep what remains shielded in the lockboxes of locals’ minds hidden from the view of mainlander’s, behind an idiomatic screen of inscrutability, but few pure-blood Hawaiians remain, in that, ethnically, Hawaii is not so much a melting pot as a gene Cuisinart.
Officially, the population is a little less than one-fourth white, or Haole--26% Hawaiian and part-Hawaiian--16% mixed-race non-Hawaiian--15% Japanese--15% Filipino--and almost 2% “other,” which include other Polynesians such as Guamanians and their neighbors, the Chomorrans.
And Chomorran is an actual ethnicity box on the U.S. census form we will all be receiving April one, one month from today and describes the people who live in the Marianas Islands above Guam about seven hours flying time west of here, situated just barely on the far side of the International Dateline, which is why you’ll often heard it said of this tropical locale, “Chomorro, Chomorro, I love ya, Chomorro, you’re always a day away.
©2000 Dave McBride, all rights reserved (No reproduction or rebroadcast without express written permission from the Commissioner of Major League Baseball)]
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