Geoffrey White

Professor

Background
General Interests
Current Research
Selected Publications
Courses Taught

Background: I received my B.A. from Princeton in 1971 and PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 1978. At San Diego I discovered the Pacific and began research in the Solomon Islands where I have been working off and on ever since. I am currently a professor in the department and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the East-West Center. I am also affiliate faculty with the Certificate Program in International Cultural Studies, co-editor of the Stanford Press series on Contemporary Issues in Asia and the Pacific, and member of the editorial boards of American Ethnologist, Ethos, and The Contemporary Pacific.

General Interests:
The politics and ideology of culture; historical discourse; war memory; culture, self, and emotion; ethnographic methods; Pacific Island societies; America.

My teaching includes graduate and undergraduate courses focused on anthropological and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of public culture, particularly in areas critical to the formation of identity and subjectivitgy ("History and Memory," Culture, Identity, and Emotion" and "The Anthropology of Tourism"). I also teach courses on ethnographic methods and Pacific Islands societies.

New Opportunity: In Summer 2008 I will teach "The Anthropology of Tourism" (Anthropology 316) as a Study Abroad course in the UH Paris Summer Program. Deadline for application: February 19, 2008. For more information and application materials see http://www.studyabroad.org/parissummercourse.htm and/or download our flyer.

Current Research:
In addition to ongoing work in the Solomon Islands on topics related to colonial history, cultural policy, and globalization, I have been working on Pacific and American war memory, with particular interest in Pearl Harbor as a site of historical imagination and national identity formation. With initial support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation I have been doing ethnographic research at the USS Arizona Memorial, carried out in cooperation with the National Park Service who operate the Memorial.

My work at the East-West Center involves the organization of summer programs for college teachers and school teachers, with support of the National Endowment for the Humanities. These activitites include teacher workshops on "Remembering Pearl Harbor: History, Memory, and Memorial" and, previously, programs for college faculty on "Re-Imagining Indigenous Cultures: The Pacific Islands".

Selected Publications:
2006  Landscapes of Power: National Memorials and the Domestication of Affect. City & Society 18(1): 50-61.

2006  Memory Moments. In The Immanent  Past: Culture and Psyche at the Juncture of Memory and History, Special Issue edited by K. Birth. Ethos 34(2): 325-341.

2005  Emotive Institutions. In A Companion to Psychological Anthropology: Modernity and Psychocultural Change. C. Casey & R. Edgerton, eds. London: Blackwell. Pp. 241-254.

2004 National Subjects: September 11 and Pearl Harbor. American Ethnologist 31(3).

2003 Pearl Harbor and September 11: War Memory and American Patriotism in the 9-11 Era. In Laura Hein and Daizaburo Yui, eds. Crossed Memories: Perspectives on 9/11 and American Power. Tokyo: Center for Pacific and American Studies, University of Tokyo. Pp. 2-29. published online at Japan Focus; and Znet magazine.

2002 Disney's Pearl Harbor: National Memory at the Movies. The Public Historian 24(4): 97-115.

2001 Public History and Globalization: Ethnography at the USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor. Cultural Resource Management 24(5):9-13.

2001 Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (edited with T. Fujitani and L. Yoneyama).

2000 Voyaging in the Contemporary Pacific. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield (edited with D. Hanlon).

1997 Chiefs Today: Traditional Pacific Leadership and the Postcolonial State. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (edited with L. Lindstrom)

1996 War Remains: The Culture of Preservation in the Southwest Pacific. Cultural Resource Management 24(5):9-13.

1995 Memory Wars: The Politics of Remembering the Asia/Pacific war. East-West Center Issue Paper No. 21 (July)

1994 Culture, Kastom, Tradition: Cultural Policy in Melanesia. Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific (edited with L. Lindstrom).

1992 New Directions in Psychological Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (edited with T. Schwartz & C. Lutz).

1991 Identity Through History: Living Stories in a Solomon Islands Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1990 Island Encounters: Black and White Memories of the Pacific War. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. (co-authored with L. Lindstrom).

1990 Disentangling: Conflict Discourse in Pacific Societies. Stanford: Stanford University Press. (edited with K. Watson-Gegeo).

1989 The Pacific Theater: Island Representations of World War II. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, and Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press (edited with L. Lindstrom; recipient of the 1992 Masayoshi Ohira Prize).

1988 Cheke Holo (Maringe/Hograno) Dictionary. Canberra: ANU Pacific Linguistics, Series C, No. 97 (with F. Kokhonigita and H. Pulomana).

1987 Pacific Encounters: Island Memories of World War II. Honolulu: East-West Center. (exhibit booklet, 25 pp.)

1985) Person, Self and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley: University of California Press (edited with J. Kirkpatrick).

Courses Taught:

Anthropology 408 (History and Memory)

This course introduces critical perspectives on collective memory. Using readings, films, and student projects the course takes up issues and debates that surround collective remembering and forgetting, from families to nation-states. Case studies are used to examine memory as an active, value-laden process of reconstruction—a process in which multiple stories about the past contend for recognition, for moral judgment, and emotional impact.

How much do you know about your past? How do you come to have that knowledge and why does it matter? These questions about ordinary memory at the personal level can also be asked of families, communities, and whole nations. How do societies remember? How do they forget? How do nation states use the past to create a sense of a common heritage and future? What are the politics of memory, whether in families, communities, or nations, that lead to systematic remembering and forgetting? Why is it that some forms of collective remembering are surrounded by intense emotions and politics?

The course also considers the fate of memory in an era of instant retrieval, in which the present is saturated with images of the past in television programs, photographs, films, video games and internet sites. As television and film projects take on historical topics, and as historic sites, museums, and memorials become tourist destinations, how is the past transformed as an object of popular consumption? Spring 2008 syllabus

Anth 200 (Cultural Anthropology)

This course is an introduction to cultural anthropology, designed for students intending to major in the field, but open to others with interest in cultural study. Enrollment in the course presumes a willingness to engage actively with concepts and practices that define the discipline of cultural anthropology. Class attendance is required.

At the heart of anthropology is the concept of culture, conceived as the webs of meaning that people use to make sense of their everyday lives, communicate with others, and organize everything from feelings to ethical judgments. Bound up with the concept of culture is the sensitivity to cultural difference and alternative ways of perceiving and experiencing the world. This course offers students an opportunity to take such differences seriously and develop an understanding of basic tools useful for the study and interpretation of cultural worlds, both familiar and unfamiliar.

We will do this through a combination of readings, films, and exercises conducted inside and outside of class. Regular participation is mandatory. While there is no traditional textbook, we will use a sourcebook of anthropological writings that illustrate the range of problems and approaches that characterize the work of cultural anthropologists today. The remainder of course reading consists of three books that exemplify the nature of ethnographic writing - books that represent distinct cultural worlds (Trobriand Islands in Papua New Guinea; Hawai'i, and the transnational African communities of New York City). We will use these books to explore various styles of anthropological research and analysis. Discussion of "ethnography" and "fieldwork" - practices that define the field - will be augmented with student projects that provide the opportunity to learn about anthropology firsthand by doing ethnography. Fall 2005 syllabus

Anth 424 Culture, Identity and Emotion (Psychological Anthropology)

How do language and cultural practices shape self understanding and emotional experience? And, conversely, how do cultural formations of self and emotion work to maintain social identities such as gender and ethnicity? This course explores these questions by taking up recent work in cultural and psychological anthropology as well as cultural psychology. By examining local concepts of self and emotion in a number of societies, the comparative approach of these fields calls attention to the role of culture in aspects of psychology commonly regarded as universal and biologically determined. The course looks at the creation of emotional meaning in everyday life with particular attention to the role of life stories and other narrative practices. Overall, the course reflects upon ways in which cultural and ethnographic approaches can expand our understanding of the significance of the "psychological" in society and history. Fall 2003 syllabus

Anth 608 (History and Memory)

The recognition that histories--stories about the past--play a central role in social movements, national politics, and personal lives has evoked an explosion of interest in the study of collective "memory." This seminar reviews disciplinary paradigms that have been brought to bear on problems of history and memory as culturally formed and politically contested realities. Anthropology, with its orientation toward small scale communities and oral discourse, has focused especially on the role of narrative and ritual practice in shaping representations of the past. Other disciplines have been more concerned with textual and mass-mediated representations of history in(post)industrialized societies.

This course considers work across this spectrum of approaches by considering a number of case studies of memory politics in diverse institutional locations. Specifically, how may the tools of ethnography be used to analyze symbolic and political forces that shape cultural histories and underwrite their power? How and where is collective memory created in today's globalizing societies? In answering these questions the course examines historical representation in specific media, asking how different modes of representation create distinctive forms of historical understanding, including oral narrative, textbooks, film, photographs, architecture, and electronic media. The course also considers a range of institutional sites in which collective histories are made public and authoritative, including commemorative practices, memorials, museums, tourist sites, malls, and popular culture. Fall 2005 Syllabus

Anth 610  The Anthropology of Tourism

Tourism--that is, temporary and continuing flows of people from one part of the world to another for purposes of pleasure and travel--has come to play an increasingly critical part of the global economy. This course examines tourism in its cultural forms, ideologies and practices. We see tourism as inextricably linked to consumer culture, transnational movements of people and goods, post-colonial politics, and global capitalism. Tourism is an arena for the production of identities bound up with oppositions such as primitive/modern, authentic/inauthentic, self/other. The goal of the course is to explore these phenomena through readings, discussion and original research. Students will design and conduct their own research on tourism and present their findings.

The course involves not only readings, but on-site visits, activities, films, guest lectures, and discussions. Hawai'i affords an opportunity to examine the complex social and cultural conditions of tourism in one of the world’s busiest tourist economies.  Fall 2007 syllabus

Anth 710 (Seminar in Research Methods: Ethnography)

This seminar provides an introduction to ethnographic methods, concentrating on practices of interviewing and recording most used in participatory research. The seminar emphasizes interpretive methods. Much of the learning is through doing. Readings and discussion are combined with a limited amount of ethnographic practice, primarily in the form of various styles of interviewing. Approaches to the study of discourse are emphasized, including the analysis of texts, conversation, interview protocols, and life histories. On the assumption that community-based research requires flexibility and adaptation to local circumstances, the seminar critically examines the strengths and weaknesses of a variety of methods for diverse kinds of research question. Discussion of the politics and ethics of fieldwork inform the seminar's work throughout. Fall 2006 syllabus

Home | People | Programs | Courses | News & Events | Resources