Imagining the Marshall Islands

Abstract

As anthropologists have developed a more critical eye, earlier assurnptions about the privileged position of antliropological texts have been dismissed as elitist, self-serving, and paternalistic. Perhaps James Clifford was the first to recognize the limitations of such possessiveness toward these imagined others, but liis call for a broader view has been taken up by many in the field. Here, I
consider the images of three interlopers, none of them anthropologists, as they each, in separate historical contexts and different positional circumstances, come to imagine Marshall Islanders as certain types of others. A consideration of these accounts reveals a good deal about historical positioning, but perhaps even more about the ways that representations always remain contextual, pointing in multiple directions and to far rnore than their ostensible gbjects. At the same time they lend contours to those intersubjective objects through depictions that are perduring if not always consistently credible or persuasive.