An Ethnopsychological Perspective on Migration: A Small Island Example
An Ethnopsychological Perspective on Migration: A Small Island Example (PDF) (Report). George Mason University. 2007. pp. 1–10.
- Has attachment: File:ANUXV856.pdf
Abstract: The text describes a small-island community of Tobians maintaining cultural continuities from a pre-contact past during and after approximately fifty years of colonial rule and conversion to Christianity. It notes an island-wide collaborative subsistence adaptation that structured daily life and social organization.
It documents a transition by 2007 to a wage-based livelihood associated with migration to Koror, Palau. It records continuities in Tobian ideas used for self-description and social evaluation, including the centrality of shame, the role of gossip in producing shame, and the high value placed on social intelligence, alongside changes such as the marked reduction of links between rage, shame, and suicide, attributed largely to alcohol. It notes intergenerational differences in discourse among children raised in Koror compared with parents and grandparents known from forty years earlier.
It situates these observations within a shift in migration theory from classical push–pull models to approaches foregrounding human agency, highlighting the relevance of local folk psychology to understanding migration processes and outcomes, and characterizing local ideas as potential initial conditions that can set complex processes in motion.
