Micronesian Chiefs Under American Rule: Military Occupation, Democracy, and Trajectories of Traditional Leadership

Poyer, Lin; Carucci, Laurence M.; Falgout, Suzanne (2015-12-15). "Micronesian Chiefs Under American Rule: Military Occupation, Democracy, and Trajectories of Traditional Leadership". Journal of Policy History. 28 (1): 105–132. doi:10.1017/S0898030615000391. ISSN 1528-4190 0898-0306, 1528-4190 .

Abstract: The U.S. military has historically and recently been involved in regions characterized by substate political formations, of the type known to anthropologists as tribes and chiefdoms. This article uses the U.S. occupation of the Japanese Mandate islands in the Pacific War as an example of differing outcomes when American political ideas and practices intersect chiefdoms under conditions of war.

Chiefdoms and tribes were widespread in the past in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East; the societies of the Pacific Islands are among the best-known examples. These substate forms were subsumed into colonial, and then national, regimes. Chiefly political systems remain important elements of nation-states in much of the world, requiring national and international actors to understand and engage with these "traditional" leaders. Yet chiefdoms are seldom recognized as sophisticated and complex political forms, rooted in local cultural concepts and social, economic, and political structures, shaped by history and by global forces. Instead, popular European and American understandings of chiefs come from colonial-era descriptions and syntheses by nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropologists who saw chiefdoms as a stage in governance that would disappear as all societies moved toward a Western-style representative democracy. Such views--of chiefs as ahistorically "traditional," unsophisticated, and bound to wane with modernization--have shaped policy and pragmatic relations with these leaders. This article attempts to delineate more accurately the multifaceted contours of chiefly societies, both in the past and as they continue to function in the contemporary world.

American military encounters with chiefly societies have been studied by historians in the contexts of the Native American/Indian Wars and the Philippines. More recently, military strategists and political scientists analyze chiefly sociopolitics in the Middle East and Central Asia, and anthropological expertise has contributed to understanding these processes. Less widely known is the half-century of American experience with chiefdoms in Micronesia during and after World War II, as U.S. officials (first military, then civilian) implemented security goals and promoted political change. By highlighting this experience, we intend to give greater historical and anthropological context to U.S. policy in dealing with substate societies under conditions of conflict and occupation....

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OpenAlex: W2266598790
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