Loss of Culture: How Real Is the Threat?

Hezel, Francis X. (2005-07-15). [www.micsem.org Loss of Culture: How Real Is the Threat?]. Micronesian Counselor (Report). Kolonia, Pohnpei: Micronesian Seminar. pp. 1–8.

• Has attachment: File:QDQ93UE2.pdf

Abstract: How often have you heard someone remark in woeful tones, “How sad that Micronesians are losing their culture?” The complaint is even more poignant when it comes from one who is an Islander. Fear of loss of culture, the occasion of much fretful discussion over the past two or three decades, still seems to be very much a live issue today. Perhaps the talk of globalization, fueled by the awareness of an already changed cultural landscape, is responsible for the recent wave of concern. In any case, I’m hearing the complaint as often as ever from Micronesians with a slight tremor in their voice and a pained look in their eyes.

The laments for a culture that is feared to be moribund are prompted by the sea of change that is washing over the shores of the islands. Everywhere one looks there are signs of cultural change: not just in the schools and the churches and the retail stores, but in the political institutions, and in the household economy, and in the very heart of the family. These changes, which go well beyond the more obvious material changes, have touched the heads and hearts of most island people, even affecting some of their core beliefs and values. Signs along the roadside urging young people to use condoms are a measure of how far we have come from the days in which such explicitly sexual topics were tabooed as a topic for public discussion. The simplest things, whether the food on the shelves of supermarkets in town or the satellite dishes that put us in Internet contact with the rest of the world, seem to carry the seeds of radical cultural change...